President George W. Bush accepted responsibility for taking the U.S. to war in Iraq based on faulty intelligence while saying the invasion still was justified by the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and international terrorism.

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said today in the final speech in a series intended to outline his Iraq strategy. "Given Saddam's history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision."

Bush spoke a day before Iraqis go to the polls to elect a new parliament, a step that the administration is counting on to help stabilize the country enough that the U.S. can begin bringing some its 160,000 troops home.

Tying together his arguments from three previous speeches over the past two weeks on why the U.S. must stay engaged in Iraq, Bush said that even though the original rationale for the war turned out to be false -- that Hussein was compiling biological and chemical weapons -- the invasion was critical to the safety of the U.S.

The government is addressing the mistakes that led intelligence agencies to the wrong conclusions just as the U.S. is adjusting its tactics in Iraq to fix past missteps, he said.

"I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq," the president said at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. "I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities, and we're doing just that."

Benchmarks

In four addresses since Nov. 30, the president responded to prompting from Democrats and senior Republican lawmakers such as Senators Richard Lugar and John Warner that the administration give the public clear benchmarks for progress in Iraq and make regular reports to lawmakers on meeting those goals.

One of the milestones will be reached tomorrow as millions of Iraqis will go to polling stations nationwide tomorrow to cast ballots for more than 7,000 candidates from 300 parties vying for 275 seats in the new Iraqi parliament.

That vote is "crucial" for Iraq and for the battle against terrorists who are making a stand there, Bush said.

The election means Iraq "will be the only constitutional democracy in the Arab world," Bush told about 500 invited guests of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a non-partisan organization of foreign policy professionals and scholars. "Yet we need to remember that these elections are also a vital part of a broader strategy for protecting the American people against the threat of terrorism."

Spreading Democracy

Successful elections in Iraq also will help spread democracy throughout the region, Bush said.

"Freedom in Iraq will inspire many reforms from Damascus to Tehran," Bush said. When Iraq can govern, sustain and defend itself, "we will gain an ally in the war on terror and a partner for peace in the Middle East."

He warned that electing a parliament won't end violence in Iraq, and setting a deadline to pull U.S. troops from the country "would be a recipe for disaster."

"We will fight this war without wavering and we will prevail," Bush said. "We cannot and will not leave Iraq until victory is achieved."

Before his speech, Bush met with more than a dozen House Democrats. U.S. Representative Steve Israel of New York said afterward that the president was trying "to dampen expectations."

"The elections may not change the security overnight," Israel, a member of the House Armed Service Committee said.

'Dose of Reality'

He called the briefing a "dose of reality" that was "just refreshing."

Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who has not joined a call for a withdrawal timetable from some members of his party, offered limited praise for Bush's effort to regain public support for the war in Iraq. He said Bush has made important acknowledgments of mistakes, though he hasn't offered the kind of detailed shift in U.S. strategy and tactics that will convince Americans the U.S. is on a winning path.

"The president has, for the first time, seemed to have come to grips with the failure of the policy to date," Biden said at a news conference yesterday at the Capitol.

Bush "doesn't state with any specificity" how the U.S. will "change the course, rather than stay the course" to make sure the new Iraqi government functions effectively, Biden said.

Bush acknowledged Monday for the first time that the U.S. effort to topple Hussein's regime and establish a democracy has been marked by turmoil and violence that has cost the lives of about 30,000 Iraqis and 2,140 U.S. military personnel.

Public Support

Polls show U.S. public support for the war is declining, and Bush is facing questions from members of Congress about his plans and the costs of the conflict.

In a Dec. 2-6 poll by the New York Times and CBS News, 59 percent of U.S. adults said they disapproved of the way Bush was handling the situation in Iraq, compared with 72 percent who approved at the start of the conflict in March 2003.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to give members of the Senate a non-classified briefing in the Capitol today on the administration's plans for Iraq. Bush also has called Democratic and Republican lawmakers to the White House for discussions about Iraq.

Some Democrats said Bush has fallen short of his goal of building support.

"The president is 0-3 in his last three speeches," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said at a news conference just before Bush spoke. "In order to support the mission, the American people need to know the remaining military and political benchmarks."

To contact the reporter on this story:
William Roberts in Philadelphia at wroberts@bloomberg.net
Roger Runningen in Washington at rrunningen@bloomberg.net

Comment: No mention of the fact that the intelligence was not just "wrong," but was deliberately "cooked" to justify going to war. No mention of the fact that these LIES were used to justify the killing of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and thousands of U.S. soldiers, and coalition soldiers.

In an intervew with NBC anchor Brian Williams, Bush said: "Whether or not it needed to happen, I'm still convinced it needed to happen." The Bubble Boy can even contradict himself and not notice. [Maureen Dowd]

Never ask a guy who's in a bubble if he's in a bubble. He can't answer.

'Cause he's in a bubble.

But the NBC anchor Brian Williams gamely gave it a shot, showing the president the Newsweek cover picturing him trapped in a bubble.

"This says you're in a bubble," Brian told W. "You have a very small circle of advisers now. Is that true? Do you feel in a bubble?"

"No, I don't feel in a bubble," Bubble Boy replied, unable to see the bubble because he's in it. "I feel like I'm getting really good advice from very capable people and that people from all walks of life have informed me and informed those who advise me." He added, "I'm very aware of what's going on."

He swiftly contradicted himself by admitting that "this is the first time I'm seeing this magazine" - his version of his dad's Newsweek "Wimp Factor" cover - and that he doesn't read newsmagazines. ...

The anchor and the anchorite spent a few anodyne moments probing the depths of what it's like to be president. "I just talked to the president-elect of Honduras," W. said. "A lot of my job is foreign policy, and I spend an enormous amount of time with leaders from other countries."

Brian struggled to learn whether W. read anything except one-page memos. Talking about his mom, Bubble Boy returned to the idea of the bubble: "If I'm in a bubble, well, if there is such thing as a bubble, she's the one who can penetrate it."

"I'll tell the guys at Newsweek," the anchor said impishly.

"Is that who put the bubble story?" W. asked. First he didn't know about it, and now he's forgotten it already? That's the alluring, memory-cleansing beauty of the bubble.

The idea that W. is getting good advice from very capable people is silly - administration officials have blown it on everything from the occupation and natural disasters to torture. In the bubble, they can torture while saying they don't. They can pretend that Iraqi forces are stronger than they are. They can try to frighten people with talk of Al Qaeda's dream of a new Islamic caliphate - their latest attempt to scare Americans into supporting the war they ginned up.

"Whether or not it needed to happen," the president told the anchor, "I'm still convinced it needed to happen." The Bubble Boy can even contradict himself and not notice.

The president may fly over all walks of life in Air Force One or drive by them and hide behind dark-tinted windows. In his bubble, he floats through a comforting world of doting women, respectful military audiences, loyal Republican donors and screened partisan groups - with protesters, Democrats, journalists, critics and coffins of dead soldiers kept at bay.

(He has probably even been shielded from the outrage of John and Stacey Holley, both Army veterans, who were shocked to learn that their only child, Matthew, killed in Iraq, would be arriving in San Diego as freight on a commercial airliner.)

Jack Murtha, a hawkish Democrat close to the Pentagon who supported both wars against Iraq waged by the Bushes, has been braying against the Bush isolation. He told Newsweek that a letter he wrote to the president making suggestions about how to fight the Iraq war was ignored for seven months, then brushed off by a deputy under secretary of defense. Even after he went public, he still did not get a call from the White House.

"If they talked to people," he said, "they wouldn't get these outbursts."

Mr. Murtha told Rolling Stone that the administration's deafness had doomed Iraq: "Everything we did was mishandled. Plans that the military and the State Department had in place - they ignored 'em. The military tells me that when they were planning the invasion, the administration wouldn't let one of the primary three-star generals in the room."

The president's bubble requires constant care. It's not easy to keep out huge tragedies like Katrina, or flawed policies like Iraq. As Newsweek noted, a foreign diplomat "was startled when Secretary of State Rice warned him not to lay bad news on the president. 'Don't upset him,' she said."

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Wednesday the responsibility for invading Iraq based in part on faulty weapons intelligence rested solely with him, taking on the issue in his most direct and personal terms in the 1,000-plus days since the war's first shots.

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said. "As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq."

The president's mea culpa was accompanied by a robust defense of the divisive war.

"Saddam was a threat â and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power," Bush declared, as he has before.

Democrats were not moved by Bush's speech, the last of four designed to boost his credibility on the war and the public's backing for it.

"There was no reason for America to go to war when we did, the way we did, and for the false reasons we were given," said Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass.

Bush offered few qualms about the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He said foreign intelligence agencies â including several for governments who didn't back his decision to invade â also believed before the war that Saddam Hussein possessed them. And he said his administration has begun making changes to the U.S. intelligence apparatus to head off future errors.

The president also contended the Iraqi president had intended to restart weapons programs. [...]

Comment: Great. So where's the proof?

Comment: Translation: "Sure, the 'intelligence' was dead wrong, but it doesn't matter now. I'm going to pretend to admit responsibility for the situation because I know that many Americans will pity me and believe that since I have admitted mistakes, I'm just a normal guy like them. Then my pals in Washington will pounce on anyone who criticises me further by saying that my 'admission of guilt' proves that I'm a swell guy, and my attackers are heartless psychopaths."

Itâs a measure of the imperial nature of the modern American presidency that George W. Bush misstates the truth even as he defends himself against the charge that he misstates the truth.

It takes extraordinary disrespect for the American people to look them in the eyes and say that Congress had seen the same intelligence about Saddam Husseinâs nonexistent weapons of mass destruction as he did, and that a Senate committee had cleared his administration of twisting the WMD intelligence to serve its Iraq war agenda.

Neither of these claims is true, as many have pointed out.

No congressional committee has examined the charge that the administration suppressed the substantial doubts within intelligence circles about the information furnished by Iraqi defectors of dubious credibility. Moreover, those evidenced-based doubts were not shared with the House and Senate intelligence committees in the run-up to the war. The Los Angeles Time recently reported that German intelligence personnel had told U.S. officials that administration claims about mobile biological-weapons laboratories were not credible, having come from an unreliable defector. Yet then-Secretary of State Colin Powell made those labs a big part of his major speech to the UN Security Council. And those allegations played no small role in scaring Americans into backing President Bushâs drive to war.

The Bush administration has never shown much confidence in the unvarnished truth. The latest example is the revelation that the U.S. military has paid Iraqi newspapers to publish favorable Pentagon-written ânewsâ â better, propaganda â pieces.

Thus President Bushâs latest PR campaign has to be judged in its proper context. His poll numbers are in the toilet, and congressional elections are less than a year away. His speeches about staying the course and the light at the end of the tunnel are Nixonesque. When will we hear him speak of âIraqizationâ?

The president gives the impression that if he uses the word âvictoryâ enough times, we will believe him.

To revive his poll numbers he has hired a political scientist, Peter Feaver, to craft a message and campaign. As reported in the New York Times, Feaver came to Bushâs attention by arguing that Americans would accept high military casualties if they could be persuaded they were for a good cause. Feaver is able to measure what he calls âcasualty sensitivity.â He and his Duke University coauthors have written, âMounting casualties did not produce a reflexive collapse in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost.â

And what would those âright conditionsâ be? Apparently, they include filling the air with a lot of talk about victory, alleged Iraqi assumption of security responsibilities, and the usual war-on-terror buncombe. This last was in ample supply in Bushâs recent speech at the U.S. Naval Academy. In that speech, he called Iraq the âcentral front in the war on terror,â although he acknowledged that non-Iraqis make up but a small part of resistance to the U.S. presence there.

Facts be damned; the president is not giving up on convincing the American people, contrary to the evidence, that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. He insists on ignoring the self-fulfilling character of his war: it has made Iraq a hotbed of anti-American violence because it has made the U.S. forces an army of occupation. None of this confirms Bushâs position that âtheyâ hate âusâ because of our way of life. âTheyâ hated âusâ because of a long history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East, and Bush has only given âthemâ more reason to hate âusâ now.

But in fact, itâs not the American people that anyone hates; itâs the American policy. Readers familiar with Orwellâs Nineteen Eighty-Four will have no trouble recognizing whatâs going on here.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman magazine.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is in the early stages of drafting a wartime request for up to $100 billion more for Iraq and Afghanistan, lawmakers say, a figure that would push spending related to the wars toward a staggering half-trillion dollars.

Reps. Bill Young, R-Fla., chairman of the House appropriations defense panel, and John Murtha, D-Pa., senior Democrat on that subcommittee, say the military has informally told them it wants $80 billion to $100 billion in a war-spending request that the White House is expected to send Congress next year.

That would be in addition to $50 billion Congress is about to give the Pentagon for operations in Iraq for the beginning of 2006. Military commanders expect that money to last through May.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress has approved more than $300 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, including military operations, reconstruction, embassy security and foreign aid, as well as other costs related to the war on terrorism, according to the Congressional Research Service, which writes reports for Congress.
Asked about the spending package, Young offered the $80 billion to $100 billion range. "That's what I'm told," he said.

Murtha mentioned the $100 billion figure last week, saying, "Twenty years it's going to take to settle this thing. The American people are not going to put up with it, can't afford it."

The Pentagon still must write a final proposal, and the White House has to sign off on the plan, which President Bush is expected to send Congress next year. That means the request ultimately could differ from what lawmakers, congressional aides and military analysts are told the services are seeking.

Comment: Taxpayers in the US will pay $251.0 billion for the cost of war in Iraq. For the same amount of
money, 147,677,463 Children Could Have Received Free Health Care.

The world has shirked its duty to help prosecute Saddam Hussein, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday.

``The international community's effective boycott of Saddam's trial is only harming the Iraqi people, who are now working to secure the hope of justice and freedom that Saddam long denied them,'' Rice said.

The top U.S. diplomat also predicted that the Iraqi elections this week would yield the most democratic government ``in the entire Middle East.'' She did not mention the long-standing democracy in Israel.

The Bush administration has a lot riding on Thursday's parliamentary elections, which will establish Iraq's first permanent democratically elected government. If the voting goes well, it will provide a political pivot point for eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Rice, speaking to a friendly audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said other nations are starting to do more to help rebuild Iraq and are opening their checkbooks to do it.

``As welcome as this broad support is, I am sad to say that the international community has barely done anything to help Iraq prosecute Saddam Hussein,'' she said.

``All who express their devotion to human rights and the rule of law have a special obligation to help the Iraqis bring to justice one of the world's most murderous tyrants.''

She did not name names, nor say just what other nations could do to help. Although the former president's trial is being carried out in an Iraqi court, with an Iraqi judge, the United States underwrote and helped organize the criminal investigation and prosecution effort.

Saddam and seven others went on trial Oct. 19 in the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims who were executed in 1982 after a failed assassination attempt against the Iraqi leader. If convicted, they could be executed.

Saddam's government was toppled in a U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Saddam was captured by U.S. forces after months on the run. He has condemned the legal proceedings as a sham, and his lawyer has said it is the United States that should be on trial.

Widespread international opposition to the death penalty has kept many countries from contributing money or other help to the Saddam prosecution.

President Bush on Wednesday will give the fourth and last in a series of speeches keyed to this week's elections to choose a permanent Iraqi government. He is working to rebuild support for a war that a majority of Americans now say was a mistake.

Bush has been trying to be more frank about problems and violence in Iraq without acknowledging tactical mistakes that critics from both parties say he has made.

Rice told her audience that violence may linger in Iraq for a long time but that the insurgency will eventually die for lack of popular support. She said the number of citizen tips about the insurgency is up.

Separately the State Department issued a warning Tuesday that U.S. citizens should not travel to Iraq for fear of violence. The statement was timed to the upcoming elections.

Rice praised Britain and other countries that have contributed troops or cash to the Iraq effort, and she prodded some of Iraq's Arab neighbors and others to do more.

``In just two days, when Iraqis make history by selecting the most democratic leaders in the entire Middle East, they will do so with the moral and financial and diplomatic backing of an overwhelming majority of the world,'' Rice said.

Britain said Tuesday that it could begin a phased withdrawal of its troops from Iraq by next spring. There is no fixed timetable because the decision will depend on the strength of Iraqi forces, the Ministry of Defense said.

The Pentagon said Monday that the additional 22,000 U.S. troops added to help with the run-up to the election could leave quite quickly when voting is finished. About 138,000 would remain.

The U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, then may recommend to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld a timetable for further reductions, the Pentagon said.

Comment: How much you want to bet that if an international court did offer to take over the trial, Rice would find 50 reasons why that wouldn't work. After all, then we could all get the goods on how SoDamn was supported - even "created" - by U.S. double dealing.

Tony Blair and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, were under pressure last night to refute convincingly claims that Britain has been complicit in alleged use of CIA planes to take suspected terrorists for torture in secret camps abroad.

Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, has accused the Government of conducting a "hear no evil, see no evil" policy on renditions, after repeated denials that Britain is colluding in transporting prisoners to countries where torture is reputedly widespread. But there are signs that the Government's attempt to keep free of the controversy are becoming untenable, amid calls from MPs, human rights groups and European bodies for an in-depth investigation.

The Foreign Secretary revealed on Monday for the first time that he had agreed as Home Secretary to rendition for two flights from the UK to the US under the Clinton administration on the grounds that the suspects were to stand trial. He refused a third, he said, because he was not satisfied about the arrangements for sending the suspect to a third country.

Yesterday, under cross-examination by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Commons about rendition, Mr Straw said there could be a fourth case. He said that the Home Office was still checking the records.

The Foreign Secretary's own integrity is not on the line, but the approach of the Government as a whole has been brought under severe question by the affair. Last week, challenged by Charles Kennedy at Prime Minister's Questions about the CIA flights, Mr Blair said: "I don't know what you are referring to."

Yesterday Mr Straw said: "Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, I'm lying and that behind this there is some kind of secret state in league with some dark forces in the US, and we believe Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice is lying, there is simply no truth in claims that the UK has been involved in rendition."

But the Government's attempts to minimise the issue are being treated with scepticism. An all-party group of MPs on rendition last night published the legal opinion of James Crawford, Whewell professor of international law at the University of Cambridge, warning the Government that it could not rely on received assurances from the US Secretary of State to avoid it being accused of breaking its international obligations to stop prisoners being sent for torture.

He said Ms Rice's statement that the US "does not transport and has not transported detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture" did "not bring complete assurance that the practice is not occurring". Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative chairman of the group, said: "It is crystal clear the UK must investigate allegations it has been complicit in torture. Checking for instances of the US requesting permission [to land planes in the UK] is simply derisory."

Plane spotters in the UK have provided photographic evidence of CIA flights landing and taking off. Yesterday, a Transport minister told Sir Menzies that they did not take records of civil flights that may stop in the UK for refuelling. The question put by Sir Menzies had specifically identified Gulfstream 5 N379P, a private jet allegedly operated by a CIA front company, which carried, it is claimed, Saad Madni, a suspected terrorist, for questioning. Last night, the Government's critics said the CIA flights were using private jets to avoid international obligations under the Chicago Convention to ask for permission for the flights.

Sir Menzies said it was still possible that rendition flights were still happening. "I am pretty certain it is not enough for the Government to have a kind of hear no evil, see no evil policy."

Europe's leading human rights watchdog said that evidence gathered in an investigation into claims that the US illegally held detainees in several European countries has "reinforced the credibility of the allegations" . Dick Marty, a Swiss parliamentarian conducting an inquiry for the Council of Europe, said he had unearthed "clues" that Poland and Romania were implicated, perhaps unwittingly. Both countries have denied any involvement. "Based on what I have been able to learn, currently, there are no secret detainees held by the US in Europe," said Mr Marty, speaking in Paris. "To my knowledge, those detainees were moved about a month ago, maybe a little more."

Many observers believe the lack of pressure from European governments shows that several may have been made aware of what was taking place. One diplomat argued: "This row is not being fuelled by the governments in Europe. It is being led by the media and public opinion."

Comment: Straw sez "Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, I'm lying and that behind this there is some kind of secret state in league with some dark forces in the US, and we believe Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice is lying, there is simply no truth in claims that the UK has been involved in rendition."

Well, that's EXACTLY it, Mr. Straw!

It is so entertaining to see psychopaths behave true to form: to speak the truth brazenly as if it were a lie!

Hamburg - In it's latest issue, the magazine reports that there are indications that the Americans are using the Intelligence Camp near the town of Kiejkuty as their base.

According to information from a high ranking Polish intelligence officer from Kiejkuty, a number of Americans have lived for several months on the premises during the past five or six years. At that time, an area of about 3 kilometers (2 miles) long and 1.5 kilometers wide was even cordoned off for an isolated area within the camp: a 100 meter long, ca. 50 meter wide, surrounded by barbed wire and a three meter high wall.

Regular polish secret service employees, unlike the Americans, had no access to this area. American cars with tinted glass windows parked on the camp grounds, the same type of cars that had previously been described to "Stern" by employees at the Szymany airport as having always driven out to the CIA airplanes that waited at the end of the Szymany Airport runway with engines running.

The secret service camp Kiejkuty is about 10 kilometers from the Szymany airport in Northeast Poland. In 1968 the Soviet army planned the quashing of the "Prague Spring" at this camp.

This is also a story about torture, the war on terrorism, and the Central Intelligence Agency's practice of quietly snatching suspected terrorists and transporting them to dungeons in far-off lands, where, allegedly, they're detained indefinitely â without charges in any court of law in any country â drugged, beaten, threatened, and interrogated. âThese two narrative threads, as you've probably guessed by now, are interwoven. A growing body of evidence suggests the plane you're about to read about is used by CIA agents to shuttle prisoners to clandestine jails around the world. And new clues, revealed here for the first time, link this airliner to a small office in Reno, Nev. â and to one of the biggest figures in Nevada politics.

The Boeing passenger jet in question, which trundled off the assembly line in Washington state in late 2001, looks unremarkable from the outside. Its paint scheme is low profile: The top half is painted white, the bottom is painted gray, and red and blue striping runs along the midsection of the vehicle and up the tail fin. There is no corporate logo of any sort on the aircraft. Stamped on the fuselage near the rear of the plane is a key clue to its shadowy life, a tracking code known as a "tail number," essentially the Federal Aviation Administration's version of a license plate.

FAA records show plane number N313P was initially purchased by a Massachusetts company called Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., a tiny firm that owned one other plane.

As soon as Premier acquired the Boeing, the company began making intriguing modifications to what is normally a short-range aircraft â mainly the sorts of things you'd do if you wanted to fly epic distances without stopping for gas. The changes are documented in a thick sheaf of FAA paperwork obtained by the Bay Guardian.

First, Premier tweaked the wings, installing "winglets," little vertical fins designed to help planes take off from short runways and under tough weather conditions and to boost fuel efficiency, and thus, range. Next, Premier put in an auxiliary fuel tank system, adding seven extra fuel cells, again increasing the vehicle's range. Then, in 2002, the plane was sent off to a hangar in Dallas, where technicians added a sophisticated data and antenna system, a 24-inch flat-panel TV, and a new "executive interior."

Around this time, a Bay Area guy, a brainy character with a background in science and a penchant for speaking in baffling aerospace jargon, became one of the first people to notice that something strange was going on with plane number N313P. We met this gentleman, whom we'll call Ray, on a blustery night in early December in a dimly lit burger joint in the East Bay suburbs. Ray's a hardcore planespotter, one of those somewhat eccentric hobbyists who spend their free time tracking the flights of aircraft by sifting through FAA data, airplane radio transmissions, and the Web postings and snapshots of other planespotters.

There are dozens of planespotter Web sites â Airliners.net, Landings.com, and Flightaware.com are among the most popular â loaded with photos of aircraft and arcane facts about modern aviation. Some sites are focused on commercial planes, while others are dedicated to ferreting out details about military vehicles and classified experimental craft. Planespotters tend to be inveterate data-fetishists, men obsessed with the accumulation of facts â and over the past year, some of those facts have migrated from their insular online universe to the mainstream media, causing migraines for the CIA and the Bush administration.

Ray, who uses some, shall we say, interesting methods to get some of his information, has asked us not to use his real name for this story. He greeted us with a half joke. "There's no story here! Condoleezza Rice says we don't torture people," he said, laughing and pointing to a story on the front page of USA Today.

Back in 2002, Ray and fellow planespotters started noticing some odd flights: civilian planes traveling to places like Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Libya, and Uzbekistan â the kind of thing Ambrose Bierce meant when he famously declared that "war is God's way of teaching Americans geography." Planespotters slowly developed an index of the tail numbers of these aircraft, but as Ray and his pals started searching for more information about the jets, they stumbled into a spider web of front companies, cover stories, half-truths, and obvious lies.

Ray could verify one thing, however. For some reason, plane N313P had blanket permission to land at any US Army base anywhere in the world, a fact that sparked his curiosity, since very few private companies are allowed that level of access to military facilities. Army records indicate the service has issued only 24 such permits in the past two years. Planespotter listservs bubbled with speculation that the plane was a spookmobile, a vehicle owned by a phony front company and used by the CIA to carry out agency missions.

The notion certainly wasn't implausible. The spy agency has a well-documented history of creating bogus aviation firms to cover its tracks, most notably Air America, a Vietnam-era company that later became the subject of a Hollywood film.

Eventually Ray got another juicy clue: Using FAA data, he caught the plane making a trip from the States to GuantÃ¡namo Bay, Cuba. Given the intense secrecy surrounding the controversial base, where the US is holding thousands of men pulled off the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ray couldn't imagine the military opening up its Gitmo landing strip to a civilian plane owned by an insignificant little company. "That's when I realized that these things were the real deal," he said.

He became convinced it was being used for "extraordinary rendition," the process of dragging purported terrorists to countries where regard for human rights is low and the use of torture in eliciting testimony is common.

â¢ â¢ â¢

At this point, there's little doubt the plane served as Langley's torture taxi. The Washington Post, 60 Minutes, and numerous German media outlets have all tied Boeing number N313P to the agency, and all traces of its putative owner, Premier, have vanished. The company's boss appears to be a completely fictional character.

It was the Boeing's alleged role in the kidnapping of a German citizen, a 42-year-old man of Lebanese descent named Khaled El-Masri, that put Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the defensive during her recent visit to Germany.

"We know the CIA is using a fleet of some 26 planes," said Steven Watt, a human rights expert with the American Civil Liberties Union who is working on El-Masri's behalf. The agency's network of front companies, Watt argued, is "complicit in unlawful acts of torture and detainment."

El-Masri's tale, laid out in a lawsuit filed in federal court Dec. 6 by the ACLU, reads like a post-9/11 spy novel. A really fucking scary spy novel.

According to the suit, El-Masri was forcibly abducted on New Year's Eve 2003, while on vacation in Macedonia. His captors â a rotating crew of armed Macedonians, apparently law enforcement agents of some sort â held him in a hotel room for 23 days, he claims. Eventually, El-Masri says, seven or eight men clad in black, their faces covered by black ski masks, entered the room. They hooded him, chained his wrists and ankles, wrapped him in a diaper, and threw him on a plane, where, he alleges, he was injected with some sort of sedative drug. ACLU investigators later identified the aircraft as plane N313P.

The Boeing purportedly ferried him, semiconscious, from Macedonia to Kabul, Afghanistan, making a stop in Baghdad on the way. In Kabul, the suit claims, "Mr. El-Masri was removed from the plane and shoved into the back of a waiting vehicle. The car drove for about ten minutes. Mr. El-Masri was then dragged from the vehicle, pushed into a building, thrown to the floor, and kicked and beaten on the head and the small of his back. He was left in a small, dirty, concrete cell. When he adjusted his eyes to the light, he saw that the walls were covered in crude Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi writing. The cell did not contain a bed."

The ACLU believes the jail was a secret CIA detention center, a former brick factory outside Kabul called the "Salt Pit." For five months, El-Masri says, he was locked in a solitary cell in the Salt Pit and interrogated by Arabic-speaking inquisitors who asked him repeatedly if he was involved with the Sept. 11 hijackers, if he'd journeyed to Jalalabad on a false passport, if he hung out with Islamic extremists living in Germany.

Problem was, El-Masri didn't have any terrorist connections. He was the wrong guy, a conclusion the agency apparently reached in late May 2004, when, El-Masri says, he was thrown on another plane and dumped in Albania.

The ACLU's Watt said "the allegations are substantiated by flight records" placing plane N313P in Macedonia, Iraq, and Afghanistan during the times at issue. As of mid-2004, FAA records show, the plane had spent more than 1,300 hours in the skies, enough time to make 100 flights between the US and Kabul.

â¢ â¢ â¢

The story doesn't stop with Premier. When journalists started connecting the dots in 2004, Premier sold the Boeing to a Reno firm called Keeler and Tate Management Group LLC. The transaction is recorded in FAA documents we obtained.

Though Keeler and Tate is named in the ACLU's suit â along with Premier, another aviation outfit, and former CIA chief George Tenet â nobody's really checked out the company yet, so we decided to take a little trip up I-80 to northern Nevada to see what we could uncover. Things got shady fast.

On a cold, gray December day, we paid a visit to the Nevada secretary of state's office, a little stone building in Carson City, a small town nestled between snow-flecked Sierra peaks. The office, which oversees all businesses incorporated in the state, has several documents related to Keeler and Tate on file â and all of them look screwy.

According to the state records, Keeler and Tate is owned by a guy named Tyler Edward Tate, whose signature appears on three different official documents. The signatures vary markedly from document to document. Obviously we're not handwriting experts, but we got the distinct impression they weren't made by the same person.

In fact, there doesn't appear to be a Tyler Edward Tate anywhere near Reno, because he's not in the white pages and the name didn't pop up in an extensive review of online databases.

The only live person we could find on the Keeler and Tate paperwork was Steven F. Petersen, an attorney who acts as its "registered agent." A registered agent is someone who handles any subpoenas or lawsuits served on a business.

Petersen runs his practice from a suite at 245 East Liberty St. in Reno; it's the same address listed on Keeler and Tate's official letterhead and is the only address listed on any document related to the company. We headed there next.

We got a surprise when we arrived at the building, a five-story brown-glass office cube in downtown Reno, a few blocks from the neon-lit casino strip. Petersen shares his suite with a guy with deep Washington, DC, connections, a man named Peter Laxalt.

Petersen and Peter Laxalt have a clear business relationship. The sign on the office door says Laxalt is "of counsel" to Petersen's law firm, meaning he works with Petersen.

The building directory says the suite is also home to the Reno branch of the Paul Laxalt Group, a major Capitol Hill lobbying firm.

A little background is in order: Peter and Paul Laxalt are brothers. A hawkish Republican, Paul Laxalt is one of the bigger names in Nevada politics, having served as governor, from 1967 to 1971, and later as a US senator, from 1974 to 1987. He was a close confidant of Ronald Reagan (heading his election campaigns on three occasions), a strong supporter of the MX nuclear missile program, and a liaison between the Senate and the White House during the Iran-Contra scandal. An Army veteran, he was also, according to the New York Times, a good friend of late CIA director William Casey.

We dropped by the office three times and confirmed that both Petersen and Peter Laxalt use the space, but we couldn't get past the receptionists, who, for some reason, didn't seem too freaked-out when we started talking about the CIA, torture, and mysterious aviation companies. Stymied, we placed a call to the DC headquarters of the Paul Laxalt Group, where we reached an employee named Tom Loranger, who told us, "We don't have an office in Reno.... I don't think Peter is working for us any more."

Later, we called the office at 245 East Liberty one last time. The receptionist said we had indeed reached the Paul Laxalt Group, but, unfortunately, Peter Laxalt wasn't available. She took a message; he never called back.

At the ACLU, Watt admitted he's still piecing together the Keeler and Tate puzzle, but he feels certain the firm is simply Langley's latest ruse. "If I were a resident of Reno and I knew a local company had a role in human rights abuses, I wouldn't be overly happy about it," he said, adding that by his tally, at least 150 people have been the victims of extraordinary renditions.

One thing is clear. FAA flight logs reveal the plane, which now bears a new number, is still flying, taking off regularly from a North Carolina airfield that the New York Times has linked to the CIA.

â¢ â¢ â¢

We spent the night at the El Dorado, a garish hotel-casino that happens to have cheap rooms and wireless Internet access. Now, generally speaking, we're not big on gambling, but we were in Reno, and in Reno gambling is practically a civic responsibility, so we decided to examine the odds.

Perhaps this is all just strange coincidence â what appears to be a CIA shell company operating out of the office of Peter Laxalt, brother to a big-time Washington powerbroker who counted as his friend a notorious spymaster and former head of the agency. Maybe Keeler and Tate is a thoroughly legit outfit.

But we seriously doubt it. When you walk into a situation this spooky, there's only one way to place your bet.

E-mail A.C. Thompson at acthompson@hushmail.com and Trevor Paglen at tpaglen@berkeley.edu.

"Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories; that I'm lying, that officials are lying, that Condoleezza Rice is lying..." Our Foreign Secretary smiled urbanely at the committee (it smiled back, I fear).

He was referring to the reports of "extraordinary rendition"; that terror suspects have been flown from one country to another. This is against the law, when the Americans believe there is "substantial grounds for risk" that the suspects will be tortured during the subsequent interrogation.

The idea that our politicians routinely lie is preposterous, I agree. We found out over the Iraq war and its build-up that politicians simply don't lie. It's rather shocking to see it written down like that, is it not? Of course, how they manage to tell us the opposite of the truth is a miracle of linguistics.

But first, some vulgar abuse. The chairman, Mike Gapes gave the first half hour of the session to a fatuous excursion into the EU budget negotiations (as if they'd be told what our tactics are, in the middle of the battle). Stupid then, as well as sycophantic.

Eric Illsley opened up on extraordinary rendition. He wanted an assurance that HMG is not involved "in any type of rendition" and is not assisting the US in any form of rendition for the purposes of torture". His question took the form of three questions. It is always a mistake to ask a politician of Jack Straw's calibre three questions. Every word needs its own page of footnotes. So the Foreign Secretary was able to say: "Yes, I can definitely give you that assurance." Any question that allows an answer of such clarity is the wrong question. When Mr Straw is rattled, a stream of peculiarly Stravian drivel pours out of his mouth like ectoplasm. Yesterday, nearly everything he said was intelligible and this must count against the committee.

He was able to say that torture was illegal in this country and that if anyone were involved they'd be committing a criminal offence, but that the idea that British officials (though not officers, note) were involved in torture was simply "nonsense". There is no room for the page of footnotes that explains the use of the word "nonsense".

Kim Sengupta's reports from Iraq have made gruelling reading; the flayed corpses, the mass graves, the American director of death squads. The allegations from anti-torture groups have the power to rock the foundations of many of our beliefs. Our leaders insulate themselves and us from these realities by layers of thick, twisted language. "The answer I gave could not have been more comprehensive," Mr Straw said. And in some sense he was right. But that's not to suggest it meant what it seemed to imply.
simoncarr75@hotmail.com

ABC News has obtained a strategy document called "The Making of Heroes: Lincoln Group and the Fight for Fallujah" â part of the Pentagon's multi-million dollar public relations campaign to sell the American war effort to the Iraqis.

Comment: Just to clarify: "sell the American war effort to the Iraqis" means "lie to the Iraqi people about what the US military is doing in Iraq".

The Lincoln Group is the influential Washington D.C. public relations firm, which produced positive news stories that the U.S. government paid Iraqi publishers and journalists to print.

Comment: Again, to clarify: The US government paid a Washington PR firm to pay Iraqi publishers and journalists to lie to the Iraqi people about what the US military is doing in Iraq.

A PowerPoint presentation shows how the Lincoln Group sells an idea the U.S. government wants promoted â in this case, according to the document, the capability of Iraqi forces.

A small number of Iraqi forces were with the U.S. troops in Fallujah in November of 2004, but some Marines and reporters said the Iraqis were only minimally involved.

But under the heading "The Concept," the document shows, the Lincoln Group seeks to promote "the strength, integrity and reliability of Iraqi Forces during the fight for Fallujah."
Comment: For the sake of clarity. The PR firm that the Bush administration hired to lie to the Iraqi people about the state of the Iraqi police force did just that.

Under the heading "Rumor Control," according to the document, the Lincoln Group strives to dispel the notion that the war is "America's fight" or that Iraqi forces were defecting.

"It's a little strange to see because even the Pentagon's own estimates and the administration's own estimates of the state of the Iraqi forces in 2004 when these fights for Fallujah occurred were never very glowing," said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

Comment: To clarify: It's not "a little strange" that the Bush government paid a PR firm to lie to the Iraqi people, they do it all the time back home in the U.S.

The Lincoln Group said it could not provide a comment about this report under the terms of the Pentagon contract.
Comment: Indeed, what self-respecting PR firm is going to admit that they were paid by the US government to lie to people?

By Stephen Castle in Brussels and Tony Paterson in Berlin
15 December 2005

MEPs are today expected to launch an inquiry into allegations that the CIA held terror suspects in secret prisons in Europe, despite being told that no evidence has yet been uncovered to back the claims.

But the EU Justice Commissioner, Franco Frattini, cautioned against drawing conclusions from media reports of hundreds of alleged detention centres in Eastern Europe and hundreds of secret CIA flights across the continent.

Speaking to the Strasbourg assembly, Mr Frattini said: "There is no evidence confirming allegations that have been made. Finding out the truth means getting evidence. No accusations can be considered founded without evidence."

But Elmar Brok, chairman of the parliament's foreign affairs committee, said: "I believe this a crucial and fundamental issue. The West's credibility is at stake."

A temporary committee of inquiry can call witnesses and, though they cannot be forced to attend, European states tend to co-operate with such investigations.

The Council of Europe, the continent's main human rights watchdog, is already investigating the claims about the CIA, and Dick Marty, the Swiss senator leading an investigation, said on Tuesday his inquiries had "reinforced the credibility of the allegations".

Meanwhile, the issue has been raised with Washington by the European Commission and the UK which holds the rotating presidency of the EU.

Yesterday Mr Frattini said he supported Mr Marty. But he accepted denials of involvement from Poland, Romania and other European governments.

The Dutch Green MEP Kathelijne Buitenweg demanded that Mr Frattini reveal the precise content of the answers he had received from EU member states to the assembly. She said: "Are you happy with the answers? Can you tell us what the content was? You say people are not being tortured. Well, people are being virtually drowned, is that not torture? Perhaps you are misinformed."

Meanwhile, the German government was yesterday accused of stonewalling over its alleged complicity in the CIA's renditions programme amid reports that German citizens and residents had been abducted by American intelligence and interrogated in prisons outside the United States.

Government ministers were yesterday under pressure to explain whether Germany had played any part in the case of the Lebanese-born German Khaled el-Masri who was abducted by the CIA in Macedonia last year and flown to Afghanistan where he was held and interrogated for four months.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German Foreign Minister and a top official in former Chancellor Gerhard SchrÃ¶der's government, told a parliamentary panel that Germany had known nothing about the CIA's kidnapping of Mr Masri until after he had been released.

The Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said after meeting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Berlin last week that Washington had accepted that Mr Masri's abduction had been a "mistake". But opposition MPs from Germany's Green and Left parties attacked the government yesterday for failing to provide information on the case of another German citizen allegedly kidnapped by the CIA.

The Syrian-born German, Mohammed Zammar, is thought to have been abducted by the CIA in Morocco in 2001 and taken for interrogation in a military intelligence prison in Syria where he is believed to have been held ever since. Media reports claim that Mr Zammar was visited by German agents who questioned him in jail in 2002. Another alleged CIA renditions case involves the Turkish German resident Murat Kurnaz, who is believed be held at Guantanamo Bay. His American lawyer claims that his client was also visited and questioned by German agents while in the camp.

Shortly before that book appeared, I delivered a lecture in which I set out to summarize its major points. (That lecture is now available in both print and DVD form.)2 Unfortunately, The 9/11 Commission Report itself3 contains so many omissions and distortions that I was able to summarize only the first half of my book in that lecture. The present lecture summarizes the second half of the book, which deals with the Commission's explanation as to why the US military was unable to intercept any of the hijacked airplanes. ...

This explanation was provided in the first chapter of The 9/11 Commission Report. Although that chapter is only 45 pages long, the issues involved are so complex that my analysis of it required six chapters. One of the complexities is the fact that the 9/11 Commission's account of why the military could not intercept the hijacked airliners is the third version of the official account we have been given. To understand why three versions of this story have been deemed necessary, we need to review the standard operating procedures that are supposed to prevent hijacked airliners from causing the kinds of damage that occurred on 9/11.
Standard Operating Procedures

Standard operating procedures dictate that if an FAA flight controller notices anything that suggests a possible hijacking--if radio contact is lost, if the plane's transponder goes off, or if the plane deviates from its flight plan--the controller is to contact a superior. If the problem cannot be fixed quickly--within about a minute--the superior is to ask NORAD--the North American Aerospace Defense Command--to scramble jet fighters to find out what is going on. NORAD then issues a scramble order to the nearest Air Force base with fighters on alert. On 9/11, all the hijacked airliners occurred in NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector, which is known as NEADS. So all the scramble orders would have come from NEADS.

The jet fighters at the disposal of NEADS could respond very quickly: According to the US Air Force website, F-15s can go from "scramble order" to 29,000 feet in only 2.5 minutes, after which they can then fly over 1800 miles per hour (140). (All page numbers given parenthetically in the text are to David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions). Therefore--according to General Ralph Eberhart, the head of NORAD--after the FAA senses that something is wrong, "it takes about one minute" for it to contact NORAD, after which, according to a spokesperson, NORAD can scramble fighter jets "within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States" (140). These statements were, to be sure, made after 9/11, so we might suspect that they reflect a post-9/11 speed-up in procedures. But an Air Traffic Control document put out in 1998 warned pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behavior "will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes" (141).
The First Version of the Official Story

On 9/11, however, that did not happen. Why not? Where was the military? The military's first answer was given immediately after 9/11 by General Richard Myers, then the Acting Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Mike Snyder, a spokesman for NORAD. They both said, independently, that no military jets were sent up until after the strike on the Pentagon. That strike occurred at 9:38, and yet American Airlines Flight 11 had shown two of the standard signs of hijacking, losing both the radio and the transponder signal, at 8:15. This means that procedures that usually result in an interception within "10 or so minutes" had not been carried out in 80 or so minutes.

That enormous delay suggested that a stand-down order, canceling standard procedures, must have been given. Some people started raising this possibility.

The Second Version of the Official Story

Very quickly, a new story appeared. On Friday, September 14, CBS News said: "contrary to early reports, US Air Force jets did get into the air on Tuesday while the attacks were under way," although they arrived too late to prevent the attacks (141-42).4 This second story was then made official on September 18, when NORAD produced a timeline stating the times that it was notified about the hijackings followed by the times at which fighters were scrambled (143). The implicit message of the timeline was that the failure was due entirely to the FAA, because in each case it notified the military so late that interceptions were impossible.

Not quite everyone, however, accepted that conclusion. Some early members of the 9/11 truth movement, doing the math, showed that NORAD's new timeline did not get it off the hook.5 With regard to the first flight: Even if we accept NORAD's claim that NEADS was not notified about Flight 11 until 8:40 (which would mean that the FAA had waited 20 minutes after it saw danger signs before it made the call), NORAD's implicit claim that it could not have prevented the first attack on the WTC is problematic. If fighters had immediately been scrambled from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, they could easily have intercepted Flight 11 before 8:47, which is when the north tower of the WTC was struck.

NORAD, to be sure, had a built-in answer to that question. It claimed that McGuire had no fighters on alert, so that NEADS had to give the scramble order to Otis Air Force Base in Cape Cod. Critics argued that this claim is probably false, for reasons to be discussed later. They also pointed out that the F-15s, even if they had to come from Otis, might have made it to Manhattan in time to intercept Flight 11, if the scramble order had been given immediately, at 8:40, and then the fighters had taken off immediately. NORAD said, however, that the scramble order was not given until 8:46 and that the F-15s did not get airborne until 8:52 (144-45). It looked to critics, therefore, like the failure was not entirely the FAA's.

Even less plausible, the critics said, was NORAD's claim that NEADS did not have time to prevent the second attack. According to NORAD's timeline, NEADS had been notified about United Airlines Flight 175 at 8:43, 20 minutes before the south tower was struck. The F-15s originally ordered to go after Flight 11 were now to go after Flight 175. According to NORAD, as we saw earlier, the scramble order to Otis was given at 8:46. In light of the military's own statement that F-15s can go from scramble order to 29,000 feet in 2.5 minutes, the F-15s would have been streaking towards Manhattan by 8:49. So they could easily have gotten there before 9:03, when the south tower was struck. NORAD said, however, that it took the fighters six minutes just to get airborne.6 Critics said that it looked as if at least a slow-down order had been issued.

Critics also pointed out that even if the F-15s did not take off, as NORAD said, until 8:52, they still could have gotten to Manhattan in time to prevent the second attack, assuming that they were going full speed. And, according to one of the pilots, they were. Lt. Col. Timothy Duffy said they went "full-blower all the way." And yet, according to NORAD's timeline, when the south tower was hit at 9:03, the F-15s were still 71 miles away. Doing the math showed that the fighters could not have been going even half-blower (146). It still looked like a stand-down order, or at least a slow-down order, had been issued.

The same problem existed with respect to NORAD's explanation of its failure to protect the Pentagon. NORAD again blamed the FAA, saying that although the FAA knew about the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77 before 9:00, it did not notify NEADS until 9:24, too late for NEADS to respond.

Again, doing the math showed that this explanation did not work. NORAD claimed that it issued the scramble order immediately, at 9:24. The attack on the Pentagon did not occur until 14 minutes later, at 9:38. That would have been more than enough time for fighters to get there from Andrews Air Force Base, which is only a few miles away. Why, then, did NORAD not prevent the attack?

Part of NORAD's answer was that no fighters were on alert at Andrews, so that NEADS had to give the scramble order to Langley Air Force Base, which is about 130 miles away. Also, it again took the pilots 6 minutes to get airborne, so they did not get away until 9:30.

However, even if those explanations are accepted, the scrambled F-16s, critics pointed out, could go 1500 miles per hour, so they could have reached Washington a couple of minutes before the Pentagon was struck. According to NORAD, however, they were still 105 miles away. That would mean that the F-16s were going less than 200 miles per hour, which would not even be one-quarter blower (147-48).

In all three cases, therefore, NORAD's attempt to put all the blame on the FAA failed. Critics were able to show, especially with regard to the second and third flights, that NORAD's new story still implied that a stand-down order must have been issued. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the 9/11 Commission came up with a third story, which is not subject to the same objections.

The main question, however, is still the same: Is it true? One reason to suspect that it is not true is the very fact that it is the third story we have been given. When suspects in a criminal case keep changing their story, we assume that they must be trying to conceal the truth. But an even more serious problem with the Commission's new story is that many of its elements are contradicted by credible evidence or are otherwise implausible. I will show this by examining the Commission's treatment of each flight, beginning with Flight 11.
THE COMMISSION'S TREATMENT OF AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 11A Picture of FAA Incompetence

As we saw, flight controllers are supposed to react quickly if they see any one of the three standard signs of a hijacking. But Flight 11 hit the Trifecta, showing all three signs, and yet no one at the Boston FAA Center, we are told, took any action for some time. Eventually, Boston, having heard hijackers giving orders, called the FAA Command Center in Herndon. Herndon then called FAA headquarters in Washington, but no one there, we are told, called the military. Finally, the FAA center in Boston called NEADS directly at 8:38 (158).

To accept this story, we would have to believe that although the FAA should have notified the military about Flight 11 within a minute of seeing the danger signals at 8:15, the FAA personnel at Boston, Herndon, and Washington were all so incompetent that 23 minutes passed before the military was notified. We would then need to reconcile this picture of top-to-bottom dereliction of duty, which contributed to thousands of deaths, with the fact that no FAA personnel were fired.

An 8-Minute Phone Call

The next implausible element in the story involves Colonel Robert Marr, the commander at NEADS. As we saw earlier, if he had had planes scrambled immediately, even from Otis, they might have prevented the first attack on the World Trade Center. And yet, we are told, he called down to Florida to General Larry Arnold, the head of NORAD's US Continental Region, to get authorization to have planes scrambled, and this phone call took 8 minutes (165).7

Besides the fact that this would be an extraordinarily long phone call in an emergency situation, this call was not even necessary. The Commission, to be sure, would have us believe that Marr had to get approval from superiors. But the very document from the Department of Defense cited by the Commission indicates that anyone in the military chain of command, upon receiving "verbal requests from civil authorities for support in an . . . emergency may . . . immediately respond" (166).8 Colonel Marr, therefore, could have responded on his own.

Evidence of Earlier Notification

But this tale of an 8-minute phone call is probably not the biggest lie in the Commission's story about Flight 11. That award seems to belong to the claim that although the FAA saw signs of a hijacking at 8:15, the military was not notified until 8:38. Laura Brown, the FAA's Deputy in Public Affairs, reportedly said that the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon had set up an air threat teleconference that morning at about 8:20 (187).9 If she is correct, it would seem that the military knew about Flight 11's erratic behavior shortly after 8:15, which suggests that the FAA had followed standard procedures.

I turn now to the Commission's treatment of Flight 175.
THE COMMISSION'S TREATMENT OF UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 175More FAA Incompetence

The Commission claims that NORAD did not intercept this flight because the FAA never reported its hijacking until after it crashed. According to the Commission, the FAA flight controller did not even notify a manager until 8:55. This manager then called the FAA Command Center at Herndon, saying: "[The situation is] escalating . . . big time. We need to get the military involved." But no one at Herndon, we are told, called the military or even FAA headquarters. As a result, NORAD did not learn about the hijacking of Flight 175 until 9:03, when it was crashing into the WTC's south tower (175).

Contradicting Earlier Reports

One problem with this story is that such incompetence by FAA officials is not believable. An even more serious problem is that this story is contradicted by many prior reports.

One of these is NORAD's own previous timeline. As we saw earlier, NORAD had maintained since September 18, 2001, that it had been notified about Flight 175 at 8:43. If that was not true, as the Commission now claims, NORAD must have been either lying or confused when it put out its timeline one week after 9/11. And it is hard to believe that it could have been confused so soon after the event. So it must have been lying. But that would suggest that it had an ugly truth to conceal. The Commission, being unable to embrace either of the possible explanations, simply tells us that NORAD's previous statement was incorrect, but without giving us any explanation as to how this could be.

The Commission's claim that the military did not know about Flight 175 until it crashed is also contradicted by a report involving Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD's headquarters in Colorado. According to a story in the Toronto Star, Jellinek was on the phone with NEADS as he watched Flight 175 crash into the south tower. He then asked NEADS: "Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with?"--to which NEADS said yes (176).

Two Problematic Teleconferences

Still another problem with the Commission's new story is that there appear to have been two teleconferences during which FAA officials would have talked to the military about Flight 175. I have already mentioned the teleconference initiated by the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. The 9/11 Commission claims, to be sure, that this teleconference did not begin until 9:29 (186-88), long after Flight 175 had crashed into the south tower. But this late starting time is contradicted by Richard Clarke (188). It is also contradicted by Laura Brown of the FAA, who said that it started at about 8:20. Although Brown later, perhaps under pressure from superiors, changed the starting time to 8:45 (187), this was still early enough for discussions of Flight 175 to have occurred.

There was also a teleconference initiated by the FAA. According to the 9/11 Commission, this teleconference was set up at 9:20 (205). On May 22, 2003, however, Laura Brown sent to the Commission a memo headed: "FAA communications with NORAD on September 11, 2001."10 The memo, which used the term "phone bridges" instead of "teleconference," began: "Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges." Since the attack on the north tower was at 8:47, "within minutes" would mean that this teleconference began about 8:50, a full half hour earlier than the Commission claims. The memo made clear, moreover, that the teleconference included both NORAD and the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. During this teleconference, Brown's memo said:

The FAA shared real-time information . . . about the . . . loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest. (253)

And by 8:50, everyone agrees, Flight 175 was a "flight of interest"--everyone except, of course, the 9/11 Commission, which claims that FAA headquarters had not yet learned about it. Laura Brown's memo, in any case, was read into the Commission's record on May 23, 2003.11 But when the Commission published its final report, it simply pretended that this memo did not exist. Only through this pretense could the Commission claim that the FAA's teleconferences did not begin until 9:20.

For several reasons, therefore, it appears that the Commission's claim that the military was not notified about Flight 175 until after it struck the south tower is a lie from beginning to end. I turn now to the Commission's treatment of Flight 77 and the attack on the Pentagon.

THE COMMISSION'S TREATMENT OF AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77 AND THE ATTACK ON THE PENTAGON

As we saw earlier, if the FAA told NORAD about Flight 77 at 9:24, as NORAD's timeline of September 18 said, NEADS should have had fighter jets over Washington well before 9:38, when the Pentagon was struck. The 9/11 Commission's solution to this problem was to tell another new tale, according to which the FAA never told NORAD about Flight 77.

One inconvenient fact was that General Larry Arnold, the head of NORAD's US Continental region, had, in open testimony to the Commission in 2003, repeated NORAD's statement that it had been notified about this hijacking at 9:24. Other NORAD officials, moreover, had testified that fighters at Langley had been scrambled in response to this notification. The Commission handled this problem by simply saying that these statements by Arnold and the other NORAD officials were "incorrect" (192). The Commission again did not explain why NORAD officials had made incorrect statements. But it said that those statements were "unfortunate" because they "made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond" (192). The Commission's task was to convince us that this was not true.

More FAA Incompetence

Basic to the Commission's new story about Flight 77 is another tale of incredible incompetence by FAA officials. This tale goes like this: At 8:54, the FAA controller in Indianapolis, after seeing Flight 77 go off course, lost its transponder signal and even its radar track. Rather than reporting the flight as possibly hijacked, however, he assumed that it had crashed. Evidently it did not occur to him that a possible crash should be reported. In any case, he later, after hearing about the other hijackings, came to suspect that Flight 77 may also have been hijacked. He then shared this suspicion with Herndon, which in turn shared it with FAA headquarters. But no one, we are told, called the military. The result, the Commission says, is that "NEADS never received notice that American 77 was hijacked" (192).
Explaining the Langley Scramble: Phantom Flight 11

But even if we could believe this implausible tale, there is still the problem of why F-16s at Langley Air Force Base were airborne at 9:30. FAA incompetence again comes to the rescue. At 9:21--35 minutes after Flight 11 had crashed into the World Trade Center--some technician at NEADS, we are told, heard from some FAA controller in Boston that Flight 11 was still in the air and was heading towards Washington. This NEADS technician then notified the NEADS Mission Crew Commander, who issued a scramble order to Langley. So, the Commission claims, the Langley jets were scrambled in response to "a phantom aircraft," not to "an actual hijacked aircraft" (193). This new story, however, is riddled with problems.

One problem is simply that phantom Flight 11 had never before been mentioned. As the Commission itself says, this story about phantom Flight 11 "was not recounted in a single public timeline or statement issued by the FAA or Department of Defense" (196). It was, for example, not in NORAD'S official report, Air War Over America, the foreword for which was written by General Larry Arnold.12

General Arnold's ignorance of phantom Flight 11 was, in fact, an occasion for public humiliation. The 9/11 Commission, at a hearing in June of 2004, berated him for not remembering that the Langley jets had really been scrambled in response to phantom Flight 11, not in response to a warning about Flight 77. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste began a lengthy grilling by asking: "General Arnold. Why did no one mention the false report received from the FAA that Flight 11 was heading south during your initial appearance before the 9/11 Commission back in May of last year?" After an embarrassing exchange, Ben-Veniste stuck the knife in even further, asking:

General, is it not a fact that the failure to call our attention to the . . . the notion of a phantom Flight 11 continuing from New York City south . . . skewed the official Air Force report, . . . which does not contain any information about the fact that . . . you had not received notification that Flight 77 had been hijacked? . . . [S]urely by May of last year, when you testified before this commission, you knew those facts. (197).

In Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen says: "It is a poor memory that remembers only backwards." One must wonder if General Arnold felt that he was being criticized for not remembering the future--that is, for not "remembering" a story that had been invented only after he had given his testimony. Arnold, in any case, simply replied that he "didn't recall those facts in May of last year."

But if those alleged facts were real facts, that reply would be beyond belief. According to the Commission's new story, NORAD, under Arnold's command, failed to scramble fighter jets in response to Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93. The one time it scrambled fighters, it did so in response to a false report. Surely that would have been the biggest embarrassment of Arnold's professional life. And yet 20 months later, he "didn't recall those facts."

A second problem is that there is no way for this story about phantom Flight 11 to be verified. The Commission says that the truth of this story "is clear . . . from taped conversations at FAA centers; contemporaneous logs compiled at NEADS, Continental Region headquarters, and NORAD; and other records" (193-94). But when we look in the notes at the back of The 9/11 Commission Report, we find no references for any of these records; we simply have to take the Commission's word. The sole reference is to a NEADS audiofile, on which someone at the FAA's Boston Center allegedly tells someone at NEADS: "I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air, and it's . . . heading towards Washington" (194). The Commission claims to have discovered this audiofile. Again, however, we simply have to take the Commission's word. We cannot obtain this audiofile. And there is no mention of any tests, carried out by an independent agency, to verify that this audiofile, if it exists, really dates from 9/11, rather than having been created later, after someone decided that the story about phantom Flight 11 was needed.

But could not reporters interview the people at NEADS and the FAA who had this conversation? No, because the Commission says, nonchalantly: "We have been unable to identify the source of this mistaken FAA information" (194). This disclaimer is difficult to believe. It is now very easy to identify people from recordings of their voices. And yet the Commission was supposedly not able to discover the identity of either the individual at Boston who made the mistake or the NEADS technician who received and passed on this misinformation.

Another implausible element is the very idea that someone at Boston would have concluded that Flight 11 was still airborne. According to stories immediately after 9/11, flight controllers at Boston said that they never lost sight of Flight 11. Flight controller Mark Hodgkins later said: "I watched the target of American 11 the whole way down" (194) If so, everyone at the Boston Center would have known this. How could anything on a radar screen have convinced anyone at the Boston Center, 35 minutes later, that Flight 11 was still aloft?

Still another implausible element in the story is the idea that the Mission Commander at NEADS, having received this implausible report from a technician, would have been so confident of its truth that he would have immediately ordered Langley to scramble F-16s.13

This entire story about phantom Flight 11 is the Commission's attempt to explain why, if the US military had not been notified about Flight 77, a scramble order was issued to Langley at 9:24, which resulted in F-16s taking off at 9:30. As we have seen, every element in this story is implausible.

Why Were the Langley F-16s So Far from Washington?

Equally implausible is the Commission's explanation as to why, if the F-16s were airborne at 9:30, they were not close enough to Washington to protect the Pentagon at 9:38. To answer this question, the Commission once again calls on FAA incompetence.

The F-16s, we are told, were supposed to go to Baltimore, to intercept (phantom) Flight 11 before it reached Washington. But the FAA controller, along with the lead pilot, thought the orders were for the F-16s to go "east over the ocean," so at 9:38, when the Pentagon was struck, "[t]he Langley fighters were about 150 miles away" (201). Has there ever been, since the days of the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, such a comedy of errors? This explanation, in any case, is not believable. By the time of the scramble order, it was clear that the threat was from hijacked airliners, not from abroad. My six-year-old grandson would have known to double-check the order before sending the fighters out to sea.

The Military's Alleged Ignorance about Flight 77

Even more problematic is the Commission's claim that Pentagon officials were in the dark about the hijacking of Flight 77.

That claim is flatly contradicted by Laura Brown's memo. Having said that the FAA had established its teleconference with military officials "within minutes" of the first strike, she said that the FAA shared "real-time information" about "all the flights of interest, including Flight 77." Moreover, explicitly taking issue with NORAD's claim that it knew nothing about Flight 77 until 9:24, she said:

NORAD logs indicate that the FAA made formal notification about American Flight 77 at 9:24 a.m., but information about the flight was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges before the formal notification. (204)14

This statement about informal notification was known by the Commission. Richard Ben-Veniste, after reading Laura Brown's memo into the record, said: "So now we have in question whether there was an informal real-time communication of the situation, including Flight 77's situation, to personnel at NORAD."15 But when the Commission wrote up its final report, with its claim that the FAA had not notified the military about Flight 77 (whether formally or informally), it wrote as if this discussion had never occurred.16

The Pentagon's Alleged Ignorance of an Aircraft Headed Its Way

The Commission also claims that people in the Pentagon had no idea that an aircraft was heading in their direction until shortly before the Pentagon was struck. But this claim was contradicted by Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, in open testimony given to the Commission itself. Mineta testified that at 9:20 that morning, he went down to the shelter conference room (technically the Presidential Emergency Operations Center) under the White House, where Vice President Cheney was in charge. Mineta then said:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?" And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" (220)17

When Mineta was asked by Commissioner Timothy Roemer how long this conversation occurred after he arrived, Mineta said: "Probably about five or six minutes," which, as Roemer pointed out, would mean "about 9:25 or 9:26."

According to the 9/11 Commission, no one in our government knew that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon until 9:36,18 so there was no time to shoot it down. But the Commission had been told by Mineta that the vice president knew at least 10 minutes earlier, at 9:26. The 9/11 Commission dealt with Mineta's testimony in the same way it dealt with almost everything else that threatened its story--by simply ignoring it in the final report.19

This testimony by Mineta was a big threat not only because it indicated that there was knowledge of the approaching aircraft at least 12 minutes before the Pentagon was struck, but also because it implied that Cheney had issued stand-down orders. Mineta himself did not make this allegation, to be sure. He assumed, he said, that "the orders" mentioned by the young man were orders to have the plane shot down. Mineta's interpretation, however, does not fit with what actually happened: The aircraft was not shot down. That interpretation, moreover, would make the story unintelligible: If the orders had been to shoot down the aircraft if it got close to the Pentagon, the young man would have had no reason to ask if the orders still stood. His question makes sense only if the orders were to do something unexpected--not to shoot down the aircraft. The implication of Mineta's story is, therefore, that the attack on the Pentagon was desired.

Why Did the Scramble Order Go to Langley?

The same implication follows from another problem. Every part of the story about the fighters from Langley, we saw, is implausible. But an even more basic implausibility is the very claim that the order had to go to Langley because Andrews had no fighters on alert (158-59).

One reason to doubt that claim is simply that it is, in a word, preposterous. Andrews has primary responsibility for protecting the nation's capital (160). Can anyone seriously believe that Andrews, given the task of protecting the Pentagon, Air Force One, the White House, the houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, the US Treasury Building, and so on, would not have fighters on alert at all times?

In addition to this a priori consideration, there is the empirical fact that the US military's own website said at the time--although it was modified after 9/11 (163-64)--that several fighter jets were kept on alert at all times. The 121st Fighter Squadron of the 113th Fighter Wing was said to provide "capable and ready response forces for the District of Columbia in the event of natural disaster or civil emergency." The Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 321 was said to be supported by a reserve squadron providing "maintenance and supply functions necessary to maintain a force in readiness." And the District of Columbia Air National Guard was said "to provide combat units in the highest possible state of readiness" (163).

The assumption that Andrews did have fighters on alert on which NORAD could have called is supported, moreover, by a report given by Kyle Hence of 9/11 Citizens Watch about a telephone conversation he had with Donald Arias, the Chief of Public Affairs for NORAD's Continental Region. After Arias had told Hence that "Andrews was not part of NORAD," Hence asked him "whether or not there were assets at Andrews that, though not technically part of NORAD, could have been tasked." Rather than answer, Arias hung up (161) There are many reasons to conclude, therefore, that the claim that there were no fighters on alert at Andrews is a lie.
Some Implications

The realization that Andrews must have had fighters on alert has many implications. For one thing, if Andrews had fighters on alert, then it would seem likely that McGuire did too, so that fighters to protect New York City did not have to be scrambled from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. National security expert (and former ABC producer) James Bamford says, moreover, that NEADS was also able to call on "alert fighter pilots at National Guard units at Burlington, Vermont; Atlantic City, New Jersey; . . . and Duluth, Minnesota" (258). If so, then there were at least 7 bases from which NEADS could have scrambled fighters, not merely two, as the official story has it (158-59). And if that part of the official story is a lie, then it seems likely that that story as a whole is a lie. This conclusion will be reinforced by our examination of the Commission's treatment of United Airlines Flight 93.

THE COMMISSION'S TREATMENT OF UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 93

Flight 93 presented the 9/11 Commission with a different task. In relation to the previous flights, the Commission's task was to explain why the US military did not intercept and shoot them down. With regard to Flight 93, the Commission had to convince us that the military did not shoot it down. It sought to do this not by refuting the evidence, which is considerable, that the airliner was shot down, but by simply constructing a new story intended to show that the US military could not have shot down Flight 93.

The Military's Ignorance of the Hijacking

The Commission makes two major claims about Flight 93. The first one is that: "By the time the military learned about the flight, it had crashed" (229). The centrality of this claim is shown by the fact that it is repeated, almost mantra-like, throughout the Commission's chapter.20

Incredible FAA Incompetence

The main support for this claim is provided by yet another tale of amazing incompetence by FAA officials. At 9:28, we are told, the traffic controller in Cleveland heard "sounds of possible screaming" and noticed that Flight 93 had descended 700 feet, but he did nothing. Four minutes later, he heard a voice saying: "We have a bomb on board." This controller, not being completely brain dead, finally notified his supervisor, who in turn notified FAA headquarters. Later, however, when Cleveland asked Herndon whether the military had been called, the Commission claims, Herndon "told Cleveland that FAA personnel well above them in the chain of command had to make the decision to seek military assistance and were working on the issue" (227). To accept this account, we must believe that, on a day on which there had already been attacks by hijacked airliners, officials at FAA headquarters had to debate whether a hijacked airliner with a bomb on board was important enough to disturb the military. And we must believe that they were still debating this question 13 minutes later, when, we are told, the following conversation between Herndon and FAA headquarters occurred:

Command Center: Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft?
FAA Headquarters: Oh, God, I don't know.
Command Center: Uh, that's a decision somebody's gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes. (228)

But obviously the decision was that the military should not be disturbed, because 14 minutes later, at 10:03, when Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, we are told, "no one from FAA headquarters [had yet] requested military assistance regarding United 93" (229). We are expected to believe, in other words, that FAA officials acted like complete idiots.

Worthless Teleconferences

In any case, besides arguing, by means of this tale of incredible incompetence, that the FAA never formally notified the military about Flight 93, the Commission argued that there was also no informal notification during any teleconference. In this case, not being able to argue that the teleconferences began too late, the Commission argued that they were worthless. Its summary statement said: "The FAA, the White House, and the Defense Department each initiated a multiagency teleconference before 9:30. [But] none of these teleconferences . . . included the right officials from both the FAA and the Defense Department" (211).

Let us begin with the teleconference initiated by the National Military Command Center. Why was it worthless for transmitting information from the FAA to the military? Because, we are told, Pentagon operators were unable to get the FAA on the line. This is a very implausible claim, especially since, we are told, the operators were able to reach everyone else (230-31). Also, as we saw earlier, Laura Brown of the FAA seemed to have independent knowledge about when this teleconference started---which suggests that the FAA was reached.

Why was the FAA-initiated teleconference equally worthless? The problem here, the Commission claimed, was that the officer at the NMCC said that "the information was of little value" so he did not pay attention (234).

However, even if we could believe that no one at the Pentagon was monitoring the call, Laura Brown's memo had said that in addition to the phone bridge set up by the FAA with the Pentagon, the "Air Force liaison to the FAA . . . established contact with NORAD on a separate line." So even if no one at the Pentagon was paying attention, the military still would have received the information. Her memo said, moreover, that "[t]he FAA shared real-time information . . . about . . . all the flights of interest" (183), and the Commission itself agrees that by 9:34, FAA headquarters knew about the hijacking of Flight 93, so it was a "flight of interest." The Commission's claim is, therefore, flatly contradicted by this memo, which was read into the Commission's record.

What about the White House videoconference, which was run by Richard Clarke? The Commissioners say: "We do not know who from Defense participated" (210). But this claim is completely unbelievable. One problem is that it contradicts the Commission's assurance that "the right people" were not involved in this conference: How could they know this if they did not know who was involved? The main problem, however, is simply that the claim is absurd. Surely any number of people at the Pentagon could have told the Commissioners who participated in Clarke's videoconference. Simpler yet, they could have looked at Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, which became a national best seller during the Commission's hearings. It clearly states that the participants from the Pentagon were Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Acting Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (210-12).21 It also reports that the FAA was represented by its top official, Jane Garvey. And if these were not "the right people," who would have been?

The Commission's attempt to prove that the military could not have learned about Flight 93 from this videoconference is even more explicitly contradicted by Clarke, who reports that at about 9:35, Jane Garvey reported on a number of "potential hijacks," which included "United 93 over Pennsylvania" (232). Therefore, more than 25 minutes before Flight 93 crashed, according to Clarke, both Myers and Rumsfeld heard from the head of the FAA that Flight 93 was considered a potential hijack.

The Commission's tales about FAA incompetence and worthless teleconferences are, therefore, directly contradicted by Laura Brown's memo and Richard Clarke's book. Their combined testimony implies that the Commission's main claim--that "[b]y the time the military learned about the flight, it had crashed"--is a bald-faced lie.

Cheney's Arrival at the Shelter Conference Room

To recall where we are: The Commission's first major claim is that the US military could not have shot down Flight 93 because it did not know about the hijacking of this flight until after it crashed at 10:03. The Commission's second main point, to which we now turn, is that the authorization to shoot planes down was not issued until several minutes after 10:03.

In support of this point, the Commission claims that Vice President Cheney, who was known to have issued the shoot-down authorization from the shelter conference room under the White House, did not get down there until about almost 10:00, "perhaps at 9:58" (241). This claim, however, is doubly problematic.

One problem is that this claim is not supported by any documentation. The Commission says that the Secret Service ordered Cheney to go downstairs "just before 9:36"; that Cheney entered the underground corridor at 9:37; that he then, instead of going straight to the shelter conference room at the other end of the corridor, spent some 20 minutes calling the president and watching television coverage of the aftermath of the strike on the Pentagon (241). This timeline is said to be based on Secret Service alarm data showing that the Vice President entered the underground corridor at 9:37. However, The 9/11 Commission Report then says that this "alarm data . . . is no longer retrievable" (244). We must, therefore, simply take the Commission's claim on faith.

And this is very difficult, since the Commission's claim is contradicted by every prior report. A White House photographer, who was an eyewitness, and various newspapers, including the New York Times, said that Cheney went below shortly after 9:00. Richard Clarke's account suggests that Cheney went below before 9:15 (242). Even Cheney himself, speaking on "Meet the Press" five days after 9/11, indicated that he was taken downstairs at about that time (243). The Commission, showing its usual disdain for evidence that contradicts its story, makes no mention of any of these reports.

The most dramatic contradiction of the Commission's timeline was provided by Norman Mineta. In open testimony to the Commission itself, he said, as we saw earlier, that when he got to the underground shelter at 9:20, Cheney was already there and fully in charge. The Commission, insisting that Cheney did not get there until almost 10:00, simply omitted any mention of this testimony in its Final Report. But Mineta's testimony is still available for anyone to read.22

We can say with a very high level of confidence, therefore, that the Commission's account is a lie.

The Time of the Shoot-Down Authorization

The same is true of the Commission's claim that the shoot-down authorization was not issued until after 10:10.

In making this claim, the Commission tells a tale of yet another incredible error made by the FAA. Flight 93, according to the Commission, crashed at 10:03 (249-50). And yet sometime between 10:10 and 10:15, the Commission claims, the FAA told the military that Flight 93 was still headed towards Washington and was, in fact, only 80 miles out. Once again, FAA headquarters managed to call the military only when it had false information. In any case, we are told, the military requested permission to engage an aircraft and Cheney immediately gave the authorization (237). The implication is that the military could not possibly have shot down Flight 93, since it had crashed about 10 minutes earlier.

However, the Commission's new timeline is again contradicted by several previous reports.

First, although the Commission says that Richard Clarke did not receive the shoot-down authorization until 10:25, Clarke himself says that he received it some 35 or minutes earlier, at 9:45 or 9:50 (240).

Second, the story of Cheney's giving permission to engage an aircraft that was 80 miles out originally appeared in stories published shortly after 9/11. In these stories, the permission was given earlier, when Flight 93 truly was still aloft, after which an F-16 was sent in pursuit (239).

That original account is supported, moreover, by several reports stating that prior to crashing, Flight 93 was being tailed by US military fighters. One such report came from CBS; another came from a flight controller who had ignored an order not to talk to the media; and one such report even came from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (238-39). Evidently the Commission felt that if it could ignore statements from the secretary of transportation and even the vice president, it could also ignore a statement by the deputy secretary of defense.

In any case, the Commission's timeline, besides being contradicted by all those reports, is also contradicted by James Bamford's account, which is based on a transcript from ABC News. According to this account, Cheney's authorization was transmitted to Colonel Marr at NEADS, who then "sent out word to air traffic controllers to instruct fighter pilots to destroy the United jetliner." Marr reportedly said: "United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington, D.C." (238). But the Commission simply tells its new tale as if this report had never been broadcast.

The Commission's account is contradicted, finally, by reports that the shoot-down actually occurred. Major Daniel Nash, one of the two F-15 pilots sent to New York City from Otis, later reported that after he returned to base, he was told that a military F-16 had shot down an airliner in Pennsylvania (239).

That rumor was so widespread that during General Myers' interview with the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 13, 2001, chairman Carl Levin said that "there have been statements that the aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down," adding: "Those stories continue to exist" (151).

Besides ignoring all these reports, the Commission also ignored reports from people who lived near the spot where the airliner came down. These reports spoke of missile-like noises, sightings of a small military airplane, debris falling from the airliner miles from its crash site, and the discovery of part of an engine far from the site (151).

There is, in sum, an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that the FAA did notify the military about Flight 93; that Cheney went down to the underground shelter about 45 minutes earlier than the Commission claims; that he gave the shoot-down authorization about 25 minutes earlier than the Commission claims; and that military jets went after and shot-down Flight 93. It would appear that if some committee had set out to construct a fable about Flight 93, every part of which could be easily falsified, it could not have improved on the Commission's tale. And yet our mainstream media have not reported any of these obvious falsehoods.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

The Portrait of FAA Incompetence

The Commission, as we have seen, has attempted to exonerate the military for its failure to prevent the attacks of 9/11. According to the Commission, accounts suggesting that the military was notified in time to respond "overstated the FAA's ability to provide the military with timely and useful information that morning" (255). In its effort to correct that alleged overstatement, the Commission gave us a picture of incredible incompetence at every level of the FAA. We read of flight controllers who, instead of following instructions to treat every possible emergency as an actual one, would not respond after seeing two or even all three of the standard signs of a hijacking. We read of controllers who told the military that airplanes that had already crashed were still aloft and headed towards Washington. We read of officials at FAA headquarters who consistently refused to call the military--unless, of course, the airplane to be reported was merely a phantom.

This portrait of rampant incompetence by FAA officials is contradicted by several facts. One such fact is NORAD's timeline of September 18, 2001, which indicates that the FAA responded slowly but not nearly as slowly as the Commission now claims. A second fact is Laura Brown's memo of 2003, which says that the FAA was on the telephone with the military from about 8:50 on, talking about all flights of interest.

A third fact is that the FAA was called on to carry out an unprecedented operation that day: grounding all the aircraft in the country. And yet, the Commission itself says, the FAA "execut[ed] that unprecedented order flawlessly" (272-73). Is it plausible that FAA personnel, on the same day that they carried out an unprecedented task so flawlessly, would have failed so miserably with a task--asking the military to intercept problematic flights--that they had been carrying out about 100 times a year (140)?23

It would seem, therefore, that the first chapter of The 9/11 Commission Report is one long lie. As I have shown elsewhere, moreover, that is true of the report as a whole.24

Crisis and Challenge

This conclusion has, of course, frightening implications, because it is hard to imagine why the Commission would have engaged in such deceit except to cover up the fact that the attacks of 9/11 were orchestrated by forces within our own government, including our armed forces. And if that is the case, then our country is in even worse shape than already evident through the Downing Street Memos, which revealed that the administration had fixed the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq. As Burns Weston, a professor of law, has said, we now have "a disparity between official 9/11 'spin' and independently researched 9/11 fact so glaring as to suggest the possibility of a constitutional crisis unlike anything our country has ever known."25

Overcoming this crisis must surely be the main task before us as American citizens today, because it is likely that, unless we can overcome this one, all the related crises--growing militarism and imperialism, growing plutocracy, increasing poverty in our country and around the world, increasing destruction of our planet's ecosystem, and so on--will simply continue to get worse.

The first step in overcoming our constitutional crisis is to have this crisis acknowledged. This is why the 9/11 truth movement is in one respect the most important movement in our country and even in our world today. This movement has accomplished its first task--providing evidence strong enough to convince anyone with an even slightly open mind that the official story is a lie.26 What is now needed is for this fact to be publicly recognized.

The main reason why this fact is not yet publicly recognized is that the mainstream media have thus far failed to deal with this issue. Although they have reported on a few of the falsehoods in the official account, they have thus far failed not only to discuss any of the evidence pointing to official complicity but even to expose any of the obvious problems in The 9/11 Commission Report, such as those mentioned in the present essay. If the Commission has created a new tale about the military's response that contradicts what the military had been saying since September 18, 2001; if the Commission has suppressed Laura Brown's memo and Norman Mineta's testimony; if the Commission has contradicted statements by Richard Clarke, Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Cheney, and three high-ranking NORAD officials--Captain Michael Jellinek, Colonel Robert Marr, and General Larry Arnold--it seems elementary that our news organizations should report these contradictions. I cannot, at least, imagine how anyone from the mainstream media could support the contention that they should not report such contradictions.

Exposing such contradictions could, of course, lead to exposing evidence that the Bush-Cheney administration had prior knowledge of, and perhaps even orchestrated, the attacks of 9/11, which would mean that the whole post-9/11 "war on terror" has been based on deceit. I cannot imagine how anyone in the media could marshal a principled argument to the effect that, if that is true, the media are not obligated to report the relevant evidence.

Unfortunately, of course, principle is often over-ruled by other considerations. But we can hope that even the corporate owners of the mainstream media now realize that 9/11 has been used to justify policies that have greatly weakened our country and undermined its reputation and credibility in most of the world. And we can hope that they will, on the basis of this realization, put the welfare of our country and our planet ahead of any considerations that would prevent them from allowing the press to carry out its most important task as the Fourth Estate: exposing high crimes in high places.

2The DVD, prepared by Ken Jenkins, is entitled "Truth and Politics: Unanswered Questions about 9/11." It is available at www.911Visibility.org and from KenJenkins@aol.com. The lecture has been transcribed (with slight modifications) by Ian Woods and published as "Truth and Politics of 9/11: Omissions and Distortions of The 9/11 Commission Report" in Global Outlook), Issue 10 (Spring-Summer 2005), 45-56.

3The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).

4Reminder: All parenthetical references in the text are to Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.

5llarion Bykov and Jared Israel, "Guilty for 9-11: Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers, Section 1: Why Were None of the Hijacked Planes Intercepted?" (www.emperors-clothes.com/indict/911page.htm). This essay is listed in the Table of Contents under "Evidence of high-level government conspiracy in the events of 9-11."

7That this alleged phone call took 8 minutes is an inference from the fact that NEADS was supposedly notified about Flight 11 shortly before 8:38 whereas the scramble order was not given until 8:46 (The 9/11 Commission Report, 20).

8 The 9/11 Commission Report (Ch. 1, note 103) cites "Aircraft Piracy (Hijacking) and Destruction of Derelict Airborne Objects," which was issued June 1, 2001. This document in turn cites Directive 3025.15, issued in 1997, which contains the statement quoted in the text. The idea that no standard procedures should prevent immediate responses in emergency situations is also stated in other places in the document of June 1, 2001. Section 4.4, after saying that the secretary of defense retains approval authority for various types of support, concludes by saying: "Nothing in this Directive prevents a commander from exercising his or her immediate emergency response authority as outlined in DoD Directive 3025.1." And Section 4.5 begins with these words: "With the exception of immediate responses under imminently serious conditions, as provided in paragraph 4.7.1., below. . . . " I have discussed this issue at greater length in the Afterword to the second edition of David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2004)---henceforth cited as NPH.

9Tom Flocco, "Rookie in the 9-11 Hot Seat?" tomflocco.com, June 17, 2004 (http://tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=65). Flocco adds that Laura Brown later e-mailed him to say that that teleconference had not started until about 8:45, but Flocco suspects that her earlier statement, made to him while they were both present at the first hearing of the 9/11 Commission, was closer to the truth than her later statement, which she made "after returning to her office and conferring with superiors." Flocco's belief that the 8:20 time was correct was, he says, reinforced by a source in the Department of Transportation who told him that phone bridges, linking officials from NORAD, the Secret Service, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Transportation, were established at 8:20 (Tom Flocco, "9-11 Probe Continues to Bypass Executive Branch Testimony," tomflocco.com, October 13, 2003 (http://tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=10). See my discussion in O&D 187.

10This memo is available at www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2004081200421797.

11National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, May 23, 2003 (http://www.911commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm).

13Still another problem is that earlier, when the Commission was explaining why no fighters were scrambled in time to intercept Flight 11, it said that NEADS had to call General Arnold to get permission. But this time, we are told, NEADS simply issued the order, without calling General Arnold. This undermines the Commission's claim that the call to Arnold was necessary in relation to the earlier flight.

15National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, May 23, 2003 (http://www.911commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm).

16The idea that military officials knew about Flight 77 long before the Pentagon was struck is also supported by a New York Times story published four days after 9/11, which began: "During the hour or so that American Airlines Flight 77 was under the control of hijackers, up to the moment it struck the west side of the Pentagon, military officials in a command center on the east side of the building were urgently talking to . . . air traffic control officials about what to do" (Matthew Wald, "After the Attacks: Sky Rules; Pentagon Tracked Deadly Jet but Found No Way to Stop It," New York Times, September 15, 2001).

17Quoting "Statement of Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, May 23, 2003" (available at www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2003/commissiontestimony052303.htm).

18Page 9 of The 9/11 Commission Report says 9:34. But 9:36 is the time given on pages 27 and 34, and it is the time that allows the Commission to claim that the military "had at most one or two minutes to react to the unidentified plane approaching Washington" (34).

19Still another thing ignored by the report is the US military's prodigious radar systems. The website for one of these systems, called PAVE PAWS, says that it is "capable of detecting and monitoring a great number of targets that would be consistent with a massive SLBM [Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile] attack" ("PAVE PAWS, Watching North America's Skies, 24 Hours a Day" (www.pavepaws.org). The PAVE PAWS system is surely not premised on the assumption that those SLBMs would have transponders. The claim that the military did not know about an aircraft approaching the Pentagon is, accordingly, absurd. After the strikes on the WTC, the US military, if the attacks of 9/11 had genuinely been surprise attacks carried out by foreigners, would have been on the highest state of alert and would not have hesitated to shoot down any unauthorized and unidentified aircraft approaching Washington. And as to the capability to do this, even if for some reason Andrews did not have fighters on alert that morning, the website of the Congressional Budget Office informs us that, in Fred Burks' summary statement, "ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles] travel at speeds up to 6 to 7 kilometers per second (approximately 14,000 miles per hour)" and can hence take down "an ICBM in a matter of minutes" (Burks, "Billions on Star Wars Missile Defense Can't Stop Four Lost Airliners on 9/11" (www.wanttoknow.info/911starwars), citing "Alternatives for Boost-Phase Missile Defense," July 2004 (http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=5679&sequence=1&from=0).

20The 9/11 Commission Report, 30, 31, 34, 38, 44.

21The Commission's professed inability to discover the identity of the Pentagon participants, along with its neglect of Clarke's account, may have something to do with the fact that it endorsed General Myers' quite different account of his whereabouts, according to which he was up on Capitol Hill at the time. The Commission also endorsed an account of Rumsfeld's movements that is quite different from Clarke's account (O&D 217-19).

22"Statement of Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, May 23, 2003."

25This statement is in Weston's blurb for The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.

26Overviews of this evidence are provided in my two books. Also, in "The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True," I have laid out the case against the official story about the collapses of the WTC buildings much more fully than before.

Due to contractual non-performance and security design issues, Leon County (Florida) supervisor of elections Ion Sancho has announced that he will never again use Diebold in an election. He has requested funds to replace the Diebold system from the county. On Tuesday, the most serious âhackâ demonstration to date took place in Leon County. The Diebold machines succumbed quickly to alteration of the votes. This comes on the heels of the resignation of Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell, and the announcement that a stockholder's class action suit has been filed against Diebold by Stull, Stull & Brady and another firm, Scott & Scott. Further âhackâ testing on additional vulnerabilities is tentatively scheduled before Christmas in the state of California.

Finnish security expert Harri Hursti, together with Black Box Voting, demonstrated that Diebold made misrepresentations to Secretaries of State across the nation when Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the âmemory cardâ (the credit-card-sized ballot box used by computerized voting machines.

A test election was run in Leon County on Tuesday with a total of eight ballots. Six ballots voted "no" on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted "yes" indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.

At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A "zero report" was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.

The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied "ender card" was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.

Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1

The results were then uploaded from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator, a step cited by Diebold as a protection against memory card hacking. The central tabulator is the "mother ship" that pulls in all votes from voting machines. However, the GEMS central tabulator failed to notice that the voting machines had been hacked.

The results in the central tabulator read:
Yes:7 ; No:1

This videotaped testing session was witnessed by Black Box Voting investigators Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne, Florida Fair Elections Coalition Director Susan Pynchon, security expert Dr. Herbert Thompson, and Susan Bernecker, a former candidate for New Orleans city council who videotaped Sequoia-brand touch-screen voting machines in her district recording vote after vote for the wrong candidate.

The Hursti Hack requires a moderate level of inside access. It is, however, accomplished without being given any password and with the same level of access given thousands of poll workers across the USA. It is a particularly dangerous exploit, because it changes votes in a one-step process that will not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure, it requires only a single a credit-card sized memory card, any single individual with access to the memory cards can do it, and it requires only a small piece of equipment which can be purchased off the Internet for a few hundred dollars.

One thousand two hundred locations in the U.S. and Canada use Diebold voting machines. In each of these locations, typically three people have a high level of inside access. Temporary employees also often have brief access to loose memory cards as machines are being prepared for elections. Poll workers sometimes have a very high level of inside access. National elections utilize up to two million poll workers, with hundreds or thousands in a single jurisdiction.

Many locations in the U.S. ask poll workers to take voting machines home with them with the memory cards inside. San Diego County (Calif) sent 713 voting machines/memory cards home with poll workers for its July 26 election, and King County (Wash.) sent over 500 voting machines home with poll workers before its Nov. 8 election.

Memory cards are held in a compartment protected by a small plastic seal. However, these simple seals can be defeated, and Hursti has found evidence that the memory card can be reprogrammed without disturbing the seal by using a telephone modem port on the back of the machine.

Diebold has insisted to county and state election officials that despite Hurstiâs demonstration, changing votes on its memory cards is impossible. (Public records from Diebold, including threat letter to Ion Sancho)

On Oct. 17, 2005 Diebold Elections Systems Research and Development chief Pat Green specifically told the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) board of elections during a $21 million purchasing session that votes cannot be changed using only a memory card. (Video of Pat Green) Over the objections of Cuyahoga County citizens, and relying on the veracity of Dieboldâs statements, the board has chosen to purchase the machines.

According to Public Records obtained by Black Box Voting, Diebold has promulgated misrepresentations about both the Hursti Hack and another kind of hack by Dr. Herbert Thompson to secretaries of state, and to as many as 800 state and local elections officials.

Stockholder suit filed by the law offices of Stull, Stull & Brady and also by Scott and Scott.

Newspaper columnist Robert Novak is still not naming his source in the Valerie Plame affair, but he says he is pretty sure the name is no mystery to President Bush.

"I'm confident the president knows who the source is," Novak told a luncheon audience at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh on Tuesday. "I'd be amazed if he doesn't."

"So I say, 'Don't bug me. Don't bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is.'"

It was Novak who first revealed that Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA. Wilson had angered the Bush administration when he accused it of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat before the war.

Disclosing the identity of a CIA agent is illegal; the disclosure set off a furor in Washington, resulting in an ongoing investigation by a special prosecutor and the indictment and resignation of Lewis Libby, the chief aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Woodward, a Washington Post editor, recently disclosed that he, too, had been told by an administration figure about Plame's secret identity -- probably, he said, by the same source who told Novak.

Novak said his role in the Plame affair "snowballed out of proportion" as a result of a "campaign by the left."

But he also blamed "extremely bad management of the issue by the White House. Once you give an issue to a special prosecutor, you lose control of it."

Four men deprived of their liberty for four years on suspicion of being international terrorists disclose today that they have not once been questioned by police or security services since being arrested.

The four, who were among 16 suspects detained without trial under post-11 September terror legislation, later overturned by the law lords, give harrowing accounts of the treatment they have suffered. All are now under virtual house arrest. Although three face deportation, The Independent has learnt that there is no prospect of the men ever being questioned over the offences they are alleged to have committed.

In interviews with Amnesty International, the four - three Algerians and a Palestinian - say their detentions have harmed their physical and mental health. They also complain that their treatment has had a devastating impact on their wives and families.

The men were interned in Belmarsh jail in south-east London - which has been called Britain's Guantanamo Bay - and other high security prisons in conditions consistently condemned by human rights organisations. Their detentions were ruled illegal by the law lords a year ago and they have since been released on control orders with tough restrictions on leaving home.

Three were re-arrested in August under immigration powers pending deportation and released by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission Act (Siac) in October on very strict bail conditions amounting to house arrest. One of them told Amnesty: "We've been moving from one nightmare to another."

Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International, met the Palestinian Mahmoud Abu Rideh and an Algerian man known as "H" at their homes in the past month and spent about an hour with each of them, together with their wives. She said: "Both men expressed a profound sense of injustice that their liberty had been taken from them without their ever being charged, tried or shown any evidence against them. Both expressed amazement that this could happen in a country like the UK.

"But what struck me most was the impact that the detention and subsequent house arrest of these men has had on their partners and their families. Abu Rideh's house doesn't feel like the kind of bustling home you would expect of a family with five children. It is silent, sad and isolated. Friends and family are scared to visit - to do so they have to submit their name and photo to the Home Office, and in effect become a "known associate of a terrorist suspect".

The disclosure that the men have not been interviewed by the authorities will embarrass ministers, who have claimed that the men present such a terrorist threat that they have to be permanently monitored.

In a report today on the plight of the so-called Belmarsh detainees, Amnesty calls for charges to be brought against them or for the restrictions on their freedom to be lifted. A spokesman said: "Is this really what we call justice in this country? These men have had their liberty taken from them for four years yet they haven't even been charged and tried, let alone found guilty of anything. What's really shocking is that these men, supposedly 'suspected international terrorists', have never once been questioned since their arrest."

The four - Abu Rideh and the Algerians, known as "A", "G" and "H" - were interviewed by Amnesty. All complained of mental health problems including depression and said that their transfer from jail to house arrest had prolonged their ordeals.

"A" said: "I am basically locked up at home for 24 hours a day ... the pressure of this situation is enormous on my family."

"G" complains: "Although I have access to my garden (albeit for a limited portion of the day) I fear that if I reply to any one of my neighbours saying 'hello' to me I will be in breach of my bail conditions. So, I don't even go out in the garden. Every night I fear that the police will come and arrest me again. I feel like I have lost all access to a normal life." Abu Rideh, who has made at least four suicide attempts, says: "I can't sleep. I spend all my time in the house. I don't go outside much; I'm just not up to it."

A Home Office spokesman said last night: "Obviously bail conditions are set by Siac that are considered necessary to address the risk of absconding and to protect national security."

The spokesman did not deny that the detainees had never been questioned by police over the past four years. He said: "We never discuss individual cases." However, one security source said: "We believe these men are dangerous, but they cannot be prosecuted. Under those circumstances there's little point interviewing them."

But Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "The fact that no questioning has taken place since arrest suggests that little effort has been made to explore the possibility of criminal charges. If that is the case it is completely unacceptable ... These men have been left in a legal limbo which is contrary to every tradition of justice in this country. Indefinite detention has taken an appalling toll on their mental health, just as it has with the Guantanamo Bay prisoners."

Amnesty is calling for immediate action: "If there is evidence against them, they should be charged with a recognisably criminal offence and tried in a British court," said Ms Allen. "Both expressed a wish for fair treatment, not special treatment - that the authorities should show them whatever evidence has condemned them to this limbo, and give them a chance to refute it in court. All they want is justice."

Suzanna is 12 years old. In the eyes of the law she does not exist. She has no family, no birth certificate. The place that she calls home is the state-run orphanage in Zenica in Bosnia, a run-down building with broken windows.

The orphanage is home to just over 150 children. Some of them have lost their families to war and sickness, others, like Suzanna, were abandoned as "rape babies" - children born during the war to women who had been raped - and left unacknowledged by families and state alike.

"She is a very loving child sometimes has problem socialising," says Enisa Herzeg, a social worker at the orphanage. "We have had money donated for her care but we can't open a bank account in her name because she has no birth certificate, because the Croatian authorities refused to register when she was born." Suzanna's mother abandoned her when she was born and has never visited. "We have no way of finding her," Herzeg says. "There are many children here with equally sad stories ."

Ten years after the war in Bosnia ended we have come back with Channel 4 news to meet the forgotten victims of sexual violence. Despite the widespread publicity concerning the atrocities committed during that time little has been done to help the thousands of women who suffered extreme sexual violence and torture, or the children born as a consequence of this abuse.

Abandoned by the state, many of these women are not only traumatised by their horrific experiences but also impoverished. Cast out from their communities, often abandoned by their husbands, few of them can hold down jobs. Only a handful have received compensation for their suffering, which continues in the form of nightmares, physical injury and mental ill-health.

"I was raped for over a year by Serbian soldiers," says Mirella, a softly spoken woman of 33. "They kept me prisoner in my house and raped me day and night in front of my children. When I became pregnant I had an abortion - I never told my husband about it or about the other terrible things that happened, although I'm sure he knows." Once the war had ended Mirella and her family, unable to return to their home town of Brcko, found their way to Sarejevo. Life is hard here. Mirella suffers from severe gynaecological problems as a result of her rape and has been diagnosed with depression.

"I have tried to take my life three times," she admits. "I get 36km (Â£10) from the government every month and each child gets 26km. My husband gets 56km because he was in a war camp. I have to spend most of my money on medicines to stay calm and to help with the pain. I feel as though no one cares what has happened to our family. I only keep going because of my children." Mirella's experience is not unusual. In 1998 the International War Crimes Tribunal condemned rape as a crime against humanity, yet there is still no formal international or state response to sexual violence, the related trauma caused by rape or to what happens to the children born of it. In July this year, Unicef in Bosnia commissioned a report on the children born as a result of war rape. It is the first time any organisation has focused on these children. The report, however, remains unpublished.

Marijana Senjak, a psychologist working for the NGO Medica in Zenica, which assists women who have been abused, says ' A lot of politicians have taken advantage of the women's plight and used the issues of war rape for their own ends. The state has done nothing to organise a unified response to women's needs.

"It has used war rape as a political tool and a means to get money, nothing else.'

Amma was raped during the war when only 16 years old and became pregnant. Without the financial means to keep her child she was forced to place her in care. A frail woman now at 29 years old, tormented by her past and suffering from mental and physical health problems, Amma's eyes fill with tears as she recalls the few precious years she had with her daughter.

"I remember celebrating her first birthday and the naming ceremony we had," she says. "I kept her with me till she was five years old. I loved her. I had another child a few years later and that was hard - two young children, no job and the war going on which made everything very expensive. Nobody in the community wanted to help me because they knew where the first child had come from and hated me for it. I couldn't work because no one wanted to look after the child. I went to the centre for support but they gave me nothing and took away my children."

For women such as Amma the situation is made worse by the Bosnian government's reluctance to recognise women as civilian victims of war. In October it agreed to pay compensation, but this has led to further problems as many within the government claim that women are falsifying claims of rape to receive money.

"In a traditional society with a huge stigma attached to rape it is unusual for women to report it, and at a later stage it is difficult to establish it medically," says Slobodan Nagradic, Deputy Minister for Human Rights and Refugees. "So now women are coming forward and we have no way of knowing if they have really been raped or not. There are no living eyewitnesses and 10 to 12 years later it is difficult to establish the authenticity of these women's claims. Many are very poor and may just be doing it for the money."

Nagradic opposes publication of the Unicef report: "The children born of war rape are in a very vulnerable position compared to other children," he says. "It is the obligation of our society to ensure that these children are not discriminated against and that is why we are being very careful about drawing attention to them. Women do not traditionally talk about rape here, he says, and those that do are using rape for political manipulation."

It is not a line of argument with which Sanella would agree. Now 32, she was raped repeatedly by Serbian soldiers in her home town of Visegrad, became pregnant and then miscarried. She now works for a woman's organisation in Bosnia, supporting fellow rape victims and says that she lives in fear that the soldiers who raped her will find her and refuses to testify in The Hague.

"I don't believe that this war has stopped," she says. "The war criminals are still around and we still have to see them. The police in charge know who they are and do nothing. We women, the victims of the war, have become its policemen. We have photographs of those who raped us and killed our men but there has been no care or help for women like me who have experience sexual violence on this level. "

Nadia made the difficult choice to keep her son, now aged 10. She became pregnant after being repeatedly raped by soldiers while interned in a concentration camp. She says that she wanted an abortion, but by the time she had escaped to Sarajevo it was too late. Her husband does not know that the child is not his.

"My husband and son were taken away during the war and I was put in a camp," she says. "The soldiers would taunt me, calling me a Turkish whore. Then they began to rape me. I would cry every time and when I passed out I would wake up with a different soldier in the room and they would keep going until I didn't come round any more. When they found out I was pregnant they put me on a truck and I arrived in Sarejevo. I had to take medicines to calm me down and I think this is why my son is so nervous and has to have therapy."Nadia will not abandon her son as so many women have done with their children born of rape. "I love my son," she says. "Sometimes I look at him and feel very angry though - I see him as a focus for what has gone wrong with my family and our lives."

Despite their mutual enthusiasm for ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Israel and the United States appear increasingly at odds over what to do about the larger Middle East region.

While the administration of President George W. Bush favours, or is at least indifferent to, the collapse of the Baathist regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Israelis reportedly made it very clear in high-level talks here late last month that they do not see the alternatives to the young leader as particularly attractive.

At the same time, while Washington appears relatively content with Europe and Russia taking the lead in diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to curb its nuclear programme well short of any weapons capacity, Israel is growing concerned that Washington's threats to push for international sanctions or even attack suspected nuclear targets in Iran are becoming less and less credible.

The government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whose new party is expected to emerge as the strongest in elections next year, is also increasingly worried about Washington's pro-democracy drive for the region. In its view, the U.S. campaign risks empowering Islamist groups that are ideologically even more hostile to Israel than the authoritarian regimes they are challenging.

In that respect, the strong showing by the candidates affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in recent parliamentary elections in Egypt, the Arab state with which Israel first established peace, is considered particularly ominous.

The notion that Sharon is unhappy with the direction of U.S. policy in the region naturally challenges the view that Israel exercises a dominant -- if not decisive -- influence over Washington's Middle East policy, particularly since the rise within the Bush administration after the September 2001 attacks of neo-conservatives for whom Israel's security is considered a core principle.

But neo-conservatives have generally held their own views about how that security can be best ensured -- usually in ways that are much closer to the right-wing Likud Party, whose ranks Sharon has just deserted, than to an Israeli government whose policies they consider too dovish. Thus, while they cheered Sharon for his harsh crackdown against the second Palestinian intifada, many neo-conservatives broke with him over his disengagement from Gaza.

In spite of their gradual decline in influence in the Bush administration since the Iraq invasion, neo-conservatives have been lobbying hard for the past two years for a policy of "regime change" in Syria. If necessary, this would include limited military strikes designed to humiliate Assad and punish him for his alleged failure to dismantle operations by the Iraqi insurgency and "foreign fighters" in Syria. They have been backed by the same hard-liners who championed the Iraq invasion, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and some senior Pentagon officials.

In the past year, neo-conservatives have also argued that overthrowing the Baathist regime in Syria would add momentum to U.S. efforts to spread democracy in the region, particularly in the wake of Damascus' withdrawal of its military and intelligence forces from Lebanon after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February.

The withdrawal, as well as the subsequent U.N. investigation that has pointed the finger at Damascus, has strengthened those in the administration who favour "regime change".

But Israel, whose own analysis of the situation in Syria echoes that of regional experts in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department, has voiced strong reservations, most recently at last month's strategic dialogue.

According to an account of Israel's presentation by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), the Israeli representatives cited three possible post-Assad scenarios, "none of them good".

They included chaos that could actually see the spread of Iraq's burgeoning sectarian conflict engulfing Syria and even Lebanon; the seizure of power by the Muslim Brotherhood; or the emergence of another leader from Assad's minority Alawite sect who would be far more authoritarian.

In their view, both Assad's secular domestic opposition and his exiled foes, notably neo-conservative favourite Farid Ghadry, are far too weak and disorganised to rally a mass following or seriously contest power. To the Israelis, according to an account in The Forward, the main U.S. Jewish newspaper, Assad "is more than 'the devil you know,' he is the only Syrian that can maintain order".

"The status quo in Syria seems to Israel to be the least bad scenario; a weak, impotent leader without any cards to play," said Leon Hadar, an Israeli-born expert whose recent book, "Sandstorm", argues for a much reduced U.S. role and presence in the region.

"The short- and medium-term Israeli interest is clearly not to see anarchy or chaos in either Lebanon or Syria with all the mess they have to deal with in the West Bank and Gaza," he said.

If the Israeli government fears the administration's activism when it comes to Syria, it is far more concerned about U.S. passivity over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme. This is particularly so in light of recent threats against the Jewish state by Tehran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, and an Israeli military intelligence assessment that such a programme could become irreversible as early as next March.

At last month's talks, Israeli officials reportedly reproached their U.S. interlocutors for agreeing to delay an effort to press the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions in light of a previous IAEA finding that Teheran had withheld information about its nuclear programme.

Washington instead agreed to delay a campaign to bring the issue to the Security Council in order to permit the so-called EU-3 (France, Germany and Britain) to present a Russian proposal to resolve the current stand-off over Iran's uranium enrichment plans.

Israel's complaints coincided with an extremely rare public criticism of the administration by the chief Zionist lobby in Washington, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. The group, which is particularly powerful in Congress, warned that further delay "poses a severe danger to the United States and our allies, and puts America and our interests at risk".

The Israelis were particularly taken aback, according to The Forward, by the administration's failure to vigorously object to a recent Russian deal to sell Teheran more than one billion dollars worth of anti-aircraft missiles, "which could be used to help Iran protect its nuclear facilities against a possible air strike".

They were also displeased by the announcement that the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, has received presidential authority to resume direct talks with Iran about its interests and activities in Iraq that were cut off by administration hard-liners two and a half years ago.

The Israelis and their supporters here fear that Washington's need for Tehran's cooperation in stabilising Iraq and thus permitting most U.S. forces there to withdraw over the next year has weakened the administration's leverage to push for stronger action against Iran on the nuclear issue, even as it continues to insist that Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability is "unacceptable". (END/2005)

FOUR churches in Sydney's southwest have been attacked in 24 hours as the city's riots spread from race to religion.

A community hall linked to a Uniting church was burned to the ground early yesterday, carol-singers were spat on and church buildings peppered with gunfire.

In response, members of the Arab Christian and Arab Muslim communities have called for a curfew for all Lebanese youths over the weekend.

Police believe the attack on the hall, in the suburb of Auburn, was intended to destroy the Uniting church next door, while nearby StThomas's Anglican Church, which has a primarily Chinese congregation, had all its front windows smashed. Three of the attacks were on churches within minutes of each other. The night before, Molotov cocktails were used in an attack on an Anglican church in Macquarie Fields in the city's far southwest.

Arab Christians have suggested the attacks on churches may have been meant as a violent attempt to "shame" the city's Lebanese Christian community into supporting Lebanese Muslims in the race-hate war, which began as a battle against young white males over use of suburban beaches.

Community leaders said Lebanese youths should not venture out after 9pm on Friday and Saturday, and should stay home all day on Sunday.

"Those who violate the curfew will be doing so in defiance of their faith, of the law and their community leaders. We are all united in opposing violence," Lebanese Muslim Association leader Ahmad Kamaledine said.

Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen welcomed the call for a curfew. "We must remember that it is first of all in the home that we learn to respect and care for others," he said.

"So I trust that all parents will join these community leaders in encouraging their own young people to exhibit mature and thoughtful respect for other people at all times."

Despite the call for a curfew, the state Government, police, community and religious leaders were bracing for a violent clash between opposing ethnic groups over the weekend.

Mr Iemma said police would pay special attention to churches, schools and church halls. "We have to be on guard for this, and these hooligans and criminals will not destroy the fabric of our society," he said.

A heavy police presence was again ordered last night as the suburb of Cronulla - the scene of race-related violence on Sunday - began a second night of lock-down and police roadblocks.

During a tour of the command post set up in the Sydney Police Centre to co-ordinate the crisis, Deputy Commissioner Andrew Scipione told Mr Iemma the situation was being treated as if it were a terror attack.

"We are running the same command and control centre as we would for a terrorist situation," Mr Scipione said.

Elsewhere in Sydney, two men were attacked in separate incidents by men wielding bats and golf clubs and asking their victims if they were Australian.

Steve Stanton, a spokesman for the Maronite Catholic Church in Australia, said he thought the shooting outside a carol service in South Auburn on Monday night was the responsibility of a "very small minority" of fanatics within the wider Muslim community.

"There is also a view that it will have been done with a view to shaming the Lebanese for not standing united," he said.

Amjad Mehboob, head of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, said he believed the violence had been committed by an extremist fringe of the Muslim community. "I wish we knew who they were. I wish we could engage with them so we can find out what their beliefs are, so we can deal with them," he said.

"This is something that started out as a minor scuffle between some youths and a couple of life-savers that has suddenly become an issue of racism and religion. Buildings can be rebuilt, but the damage this is doing to our community is extremely deep."

Reverend Glenys Biddle, of the Uniting church in Auburn, said the destroyed hall had been a important part of the local Tongan community. "For them, they have lost not only a physical building but a sense of fellowship," she said. "A lot of memories have also been lost for Anglos, Tongans and people of all sorts of cultures."

Shafiq Khan, the principal of the al-Faisal College next door, said Christians and Muslims had always worked amicably, and the fire - coupled with the fear it may promote - was a loss for both religions. "This is a crime against peace, the community and the country; a crime against harmony and against our children, who used the hall," he said.

Television and sporting celebrities and leaders from Sutherland Shire and the Islamic community will hold a meeting this morning, brokered by local MP Bruce Baird, to try to settle their differences.
Additional reporting: John Stapleton, Jonathan Porter

Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's former ambassador to Washington, was repeatedly warned by the head of the Foreign Office that he could not publish his controversial memoirs without submitting the book for his prior approval, letters released yesterday show.

Letters over the summer warned him that publication would breach Diplomatic Service regulations. He circumvented FO demands by taking the memoirs to the Cabinet Office. The new cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, said he was disappointed that Sir Christopher was publishing the book, but had no other comment.

In a letter dated July 26 the permanent under-secretary at the FO, Sir Michael Jay, wrote to Sir Christopher saying: "Imagine what would happen if the book were published and, however inadvertently, it contained disclosures that were in fact damaging to the international relations of the UK ... This is not a situation that I can allow to arise." He said the FO had taken legal advice "and we are satisfied that the regulations entitle us to insist on this".

The book DC Confidential, serialised in the Guardian, contained disclosures about the build up to the Iraq war. In his reply Sir Christopher assured the FO he was not in the business of disclosing confidential conversations. In a further letter on August 7 he said he may be in a better position than the civil service to judge what was or was not in the public interest.

Russia is the most reliable partner of the Islamic world and most faithful defender of its interests, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in Chechnyaâs capital Grozny. Putin unexpectedly visited the war-ravaged republic to speak in the local parliament that opened for its first sitting on Monday.

âRussia has always been the most faithful, reliable and consistent defender of the interests of the Islamic world. Russia has always been the best and most reliable partner and ally. By destroying Russia, these people (terrorists) destroy one of the main pillars of the Islamic world in the struggle for rights (of Islamic states) in the international arena, the struggle for their legitimate rights,â Putin was quoted by Itar âTass as saying, drawing applause from Chechen parliamentarians.

âThose who are trying to defend these false (extremist) ideals, those who are used as cannon fodder, who plant a mine for ten dollars or shoot with automatic weapons either do not know or have forgotten this,â the president said.

âThose who organize such activity certainly do this deliberately, understanding what goals they want to achieve,â Putin went on to say.
The leaders of the main Islamic states understand this, he added.

âFor this reason their representatives were present at the general voting in the referendum on the Constitution of the Chechen Republic, they were at the presidential elections; both the Organization of Islamic Conference and the League of Arab States, our colleagues and friends were present at the elections to the parliament.â

Putin said that âmember countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference have unanimously passed a decision that Russia will begin working as an observer on a permanent basisâ.

âAnd we shall continue our activity within the framework of this organization. Quite recently a delegation of Russiaâs Muslims has been to Mecca to discuss the problems of Muslim world development with their brothers. I repeat: Russia will pursue this policy,â the president added.

President Vladimir Putin paid a surprise morale-boosting visit to Chechnya Monday, flown into the war-wracked province by helicopter under tight security. Putin declared the turbulent region was on the road to peace.

Russia, a country with a total population of approximately 144 million, has 23 million Muslim residents representing 38 peoples, according to the Council of Muftis of Russia.

Comment: It's really about oil, you know. The U.S. wants to take it by force, Russia thinks that acting friendly is the better way. They are probably right. Nevertheless, the lines are being drawn, and the U.S. will most likely be "left out in the cold."

Investigators believe the weapons were used to carry out armed robberies in France to finance terrorism and that some of the funds may have gone to the group run by Zarqawi.

However, after questioning those suspected of involvement in a French terrorist network since Monday, investigators have reportedly found no solid proof to confirm the original suspicions that the group was planning terrorist attacks of its own.

The police source said one member of the group under investigation was in contact with a middleman who was himself in contact with Zarqawi. The middleman was killed last spring in either Syria or Iraq, he said.

Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, is the most wanted man in Iraq. His group has been blamed for numerous bombings, gun attacks and kidnappings.

WASHINGTON (CP) - American officials are publicly portraying a rebuke from Ambassador David Wilkins as an open, even affectionate, request from the U.S. administration.

A day after Wilkins bluntly urged Prime Minister Paul Martin to stop criticizing the United States in a bid to get re-elected, there were attempts to put the best possible spin on escalating tensions.

He spoke "in the finest tradition of our relationship - frank, open and with clear affection for his Canadian host," State Department spokesman Noel Clay said Wednesday.

The ambassador's comments were intended to "highlight and enhance our partnership" and were based on "mutual respect," said Clay.

At a briefing, the department's Sean McCormack echoed those sentiments, while making it clear the ambassador "was speaking as a representative of the U.S. government."

Wilkins, who likely would have run the themes of his speech by the State Department and perhaps even the White House, delivered the same message in Toronto about three weeks ago, before the election officially began.

But what drove him to complain again mid-campaign, some say, was the prime minister's appearance last week with former Democratic president Bill Clinton at the climate change conference in Montreal.

The two attacked the American record on greenhouse gas emissions.

"It sent him over the edge," said a former U.S. envoy in Canada. "I don't think it was his intention to get into the campaign. But he's not there to be a potted plant."

Aside from the timing of his message, which could benefit the Liberals, many see the Wilkins move as largely unsurprising and not at all inappropriate.

"No one likes to make announcements like this during an election," said former Canadian ambassador Paul Frazer.

"It has to tell you that it's a message that folks in Washington really felt they had to get out. They were fed up."

Frazer predicted the furor in Canada would die down after a day or two in a story that barely caused a ripple south of the border.

The New York Times carried a six-paragraph piece on page 21. Some TV networks mentioned it on their websites and CNN ran a short item.

Some U.S. analysts said Martin was getting what he deserved after weeks of sniping at the White House on softwood lumber and lately, climate change.

Partly, say experts, the obvious U.S. exasperation results from the buildup Martin gave to repairing cross-border relations when he first came into office.

"Americans sat up and listened," said David Biette, director of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. "Then he proceeded to make digs when and where he could."

"Americans were looking for some good feedback. They didn't get it."

And Canadians, he predicted, won't hear the Wilkins message the way it was intended.

"We all know George Bush is an easy target," said Biette. "The remarks were meant to ask: 'Why are you doing this, what are the issues in the campaign?' "

Martin was unrepentant Wednesday, saying he wouldn't be "dictated to" on the subjects he can raise.

And the fact is, Canada often figures in American election campaigns. In 2004, some Republicans widely portrayed their northern neighbour as the source of unsafe prescription drugs and a threat to American jobs because of the free trade deal.

The difference is, said analyst Charles Doran, elections are not won in the United States by the degree to which a party is anti-Canadian.

But by showing irritation, U.S. officials have played into Martin's hands, he said.

"I don't think it's very wise to say much about this," said Doran, a politics professor at John Hopkins University. They shouldn't even try."

America is used to getting bashed for electoral gain. Gerhard Schroeder did it in Germany, to good effect.

But Canada's proximity and constant interaction makes it much worse, said Doran.

"The problem is, you're maybe going to have to work with these people. The relationship is going to be very much rockier now."

The result, said one U.S. lobbyist, could be a big impact on the way the two governments do business with each other if Martin is re-elected.

"If he wins and he continues to bash, this will have been a turning point."

Human trafficking has tied with the illegal arms industry as the largest and fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world after the illicit drug trade.

There are 27 million people serving as literal slaves around the world, and every year 600,000 to 800,000 victims are trafficked across international borders, half of whom are children.

This 9.5-billion-dollar a year industry is hardly limited to the developing world, with 14,500 to 17,500 victims trafficked into the United States every year, according to the U.S. State Department.

"We have to make sure that when we are talking about child trafficking that we include the U.S. victims," says Rachel Lloyd, a survivor of child slavery and founder of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services.

"We have to acknowledge that all children are worthy of the same dignity and respect and that we don't make that distinction within our own judgment and policies and within our services," she said.

At a recent meeting on child slavery by Media 4 Humanity at the Harvard Club, panelists said that teenage girls have been bought and sold on both the Internet auction site E-Bay and the popular classified forum Craig's List.

New York, California, Florida and Texas have the highest rates of slavery in the U.S., and close to 300,000 U.S. boys and girls are at risk of falling into the sex trade.

"Slavery has returned to American soil," said Steve Wagner, the director of the human trafficking programme at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Wagner added that the estimated number of trafficking victims in the U.S. -- 50,000 -- is most likely much greater. It is assumed that one-third are children.

"In the U.S., victims of human trafficking will not self-report, this makes it unlike virtually any other category of major crime," he said.

In October 2000, the U.S. passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) to prevent human trafficking overseas, increase prosecution of human traffickers in the United States, and protect victims and provide them with federal and state assistance. Before the TVPA, no federal law existed in the U.S. to protect victims, so many were treated like illegal immigrants under state legislation.

While women and children are particularly vulnerable to trafficking for the sex trade, human trafficking is not limited to sexual exploitation. It also includes people who are forced into marriage or into bonded labour markets, such as sweatshops, agricultural plantations and domestic service.

The spread of HIV/AIDS among victims trafficked into prostitution also makes victim support and repatriation a public health issue. The U.S. government believes there is a link between trafficking in persons and HIV/AIDS, and it has developed programmes to address both, such as rehabilitation efforts for victims of sex trafficking and education about the public health implications of trafficking.

Trafficking is fostered largely by social and economic disparities that create a supply of victims seeking to migrate and a demand for sexual and other services that provide the economic reward for trafficking.

Experts say preventing human trafficking requires several strategies. Criminal punishment is an important element, but addressing the underlying conditions that drive both supply and demand are also necessary. It is also critical to make the socially marginalised groups from whom victims are most often recruited more aware of the reality of trafficking and less likely to be deceived when approached by traffickers.

Trafficking in persons may resemble the smuggling of migrants, but there are several important differences. The smuggling of migrants involves migrants who have consented to the smuggling.

Trafficking victims, on the other hand, have either never consented or, if they initially consented, that consent has been rendered meaningless by the coercive, deceptive or abusive actions of the traffickers, experts say. Smuggling is always transnational, whereas trafficking may not be.

Another difference is that smuggling ends with the arrival of the migrants at their destination, whereas trafficking involves the ongoing exploitation of the victims in some manner to generate illicit profits for the traffickers.

The Global Programme Against Trafficking in Human Beings was designed by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in collaboration with the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute and launched in March 1999.

Activities carried out in cooperation with the national counterparts are based on the assessment of the involvement of organised crime in the trafficking of human beings. On a national level, it aims to create awareness, train law enforcement officers and advise on drafting and revising on relevant legislation.

At the international level, UNODC is establishing a database of effective anti-trafficking strategies that can be used by policymakers, researchers and the NGO community.

"It is not enough to keep providing services," notes Florrie Burke, senior director of international programmes for Safe Horizon, a New York-based non-profit victim assistance organisation. "We need to stop the crime of human trafficking."

Comment: To get the most comprehensive information on this subject, and how many high government officials are involved in, or benefit from, this trafficking in human beings, visit "In Defense of The Innocent."

"To do nothing is to live in denial and accept the lie of our existence. To sit in silent complacency is to welcome the domination over our lives. The failure to act is an act in failure, and a warm embrace to an unmitigated corruption befalling humankind."- Manuel Valenzuela

Europe's leaders are preparing for a summit battle over finance today after Poland and France dug in against revised EU spending plans.

As the EU's 25 heads of government prepared for a two-day negotiation, Warsaw and Paris rejected proposals tabled by the UK that reversed some planned cuts in spending in Eastern Europe.

Yesterday's document was designed to mollify the 10 new countries that joined the EU last year, and who stand to suffer most from spending reductions put forward by Tony Blair.

Britain made no change in its offer to reduce the value of the UK rebate by â¬8bn (Â£5.4bn) over seven years, although it will have to concede more during the summit if a deal on EU spending for 2007-13 is to be secured.

Poland's premier, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, said: "Tony, stop pretending you're making steps and I advise you, you'd better make a step or better, make two or three steps. This proposal is in no way is satisfactory for Poland."

Philippe Douste-Blazy, France's Foreign Minister, described the British plan as "unacceptable", adding: "The new proposals on the British rebate are in effect identical to the previous ones which, we have underlined, cannot constitute a basis for negotiation."

When he arrives in Brussels this afternoon, Mr Blair will embark on one-to-one meetings with other EU leaders in the hope of nudging them towards a deal before the summit's formal opening dinner tonight.

British officials do not expect any immediate breakthrough, acknowledging that other EU governments will seek further concessions. But they believe agreement is still possible.

In a final attempt to clinch an agreement in Brussels, Mr Blair is expected to offer a further reduction in the rebate on Britain's EU contributions - but only if France agrees to a review of all EU spending, including the Common Agricultural Policy, which could lead to changes before 2013.

The comments from Poland will concern Mr Blair since the revised offer had been designed to bring back onside the former Communist countries and head off the possibility of Paris and Warsaw blocking the deal together.

The revised proposal would cut aid to eastern European countries by about â¬12bn from a plan put forward in June, rather than the â¬14bn cuts sought in the previous UK plan last week. The blueprint would increase overall spending by â¬2.5bn to â¬849.3 billion, or 1.03 per cent of EU output, from the 1.027 per cent in last week's proposal.

But British officials said the new member states had been offered a series of concessions worth â¬1.51bn in total, of which at least â¬1.2bn would be directed to Poland. Warsaw originally stood to lose more than â¬5.5bn.

The package was assembled after talks with Polish diplomats in London on Tuesday. But Mr Marcinkiewicz leads a minority government and has limited room for manoeuvre.

Mr Blair's official spokesman said: "We have to be realistic and recognise that we are posing difficult choices for people."

Downing Street admitted that under the revised proposals, Britain would pay an extra â¬500m to the EU, but said France would contribute â¬800m more, Italy an extra â¬700m and Germany â¬1m more.

While Britain's net contribution would rise by 51 per cent, France's would increase by more than 100 per cent, it said.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, told the Commons: "We are working hard for a deal this time but I am clear that no deal is preferable to a bad one."

Mr Blair faces criticism at home as well as from Britain's EU partners. William Hague, the Tories' shadow Foreign Secretary, accused him of "capitulation". He said: "Rarely in the field of European negotiation has so much been surrendered for so little."

American-style product placement - or "stealth advertising" - took a big step closer to Europe's television screens when formal proposals were tabled to allow its use in broadcasting.

If the plans are approved, a new and more subtle form of advertising, in which film-makers are paid to feature specific products, could become a common feature in almost all programmes on commercial terrestrial TV.

Yesterday's proposal from the European Commission is part of a package of revisions to broadcasting rules that would scrap a daily cap on time devoted to advertisements, as well as some rules on space between commercial breaks.

In the United States, product placement is already common, growing at the rate of 21 per cent a year between 1999 and 2004, and worth 1.7 per cent of the total broadcasting revenue of free-to-air broadcasters.

Pioneered in Hollywood, where big box-office hits such as the James Bond movie Die Another Day promoted BMW bikes and Omega watches, product placement has moved to TV. The series Desperate Housewives was paid to use a Buick car in one storyline, while another US series is said to have included more than 7,000 items of product placement.

Though many of these have already found their way on to Europe's TV screens, the European Commission says that only one nation - Austria - has comprehensive rules in place to define product placement and permit it under certain conditions.

Under the Commission proposal, which needs the backing of the EU member states and MEPs, consumers would be warned at the beginning of programmes if product placement has been used. However EU nations themselves would decide on the form of that announcement.

Tobacco and prescription drugs would not be allowed under the product placement rules but there are no general restrictions on alcohol advertising. There would be no product placement in news and current affairs and broadcasts aimed at children.

Launching her plan, the European commissioner for media and the information society, Viviane Reding, said that regimes in different EU countries were "absolutely contradictory". Ms Reding added that rules were necessary to safeguard a productive audio-visual sector in Europe.

A Commission document argues: "Europe's unclear, disparate, rules on product placement or in some cases a lack of rules, have so far prevented audio-visual content producers from making use of this important means of financing." It adds: "The goal is to increase consumer information while acknowledging that product placement is a form of advertising and that it should not interfere with editorial independence."

The new regime would be brought in by updating the 1989 TV without Frontiers Directive. The revised directive would ban product placement that misleads the consumer but permit it providing it is identified at the start of the programme.

The move has caused concern among some MEPs however. Philip Whitehead, a Labour Euro-MP and former TV producer, said: "If we switch to product placement it is hard to see that this will be a small part of the mix. It will become, pretty quickly, a dominant element in it. Whatever people say about this having always been in movies it is soon going to become an indispensable part of TV stations' revenue. There is a danger that, where they are hooked on that revenue they are unable to distinguish how far to go." The directive would also impose a limit of 12 minutes' advertising per hour but broadcasters would be able to choose when to insert commercials and would not be forced, as at present, to allow 20 minutes between breaks.

The directive, designed to keep pace with the change in broadcast technology, would not apply to so-called non-linear services such as on-demand films or news which a viewer "pulls" from a network.

Early humans were living in a balmy Britain 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, say researchers who discovered a set of flint tools.

Humans are known to have been present in southern Europe about 780,000 years ago. Scientists theorized humans did not journey across the Alps into northern Europe until half a million years ago.

Anthony Stuart of University College London and his colleagues discovered 32 black flint tools in river sediments in Pakefield in eastern England. Some of the flakes are more than 20 millimetres long.

Researchers worked at low tide to excavate eroding coastal cliffs in Suffolk to find the artefacts.

The tools were dated to 700,000 years, and include waste flakes chipped away by humans, the researchers report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

At the time, Britain was connected to continental Europe. A range of plant and insect fossils were found at the site that could not survive deep cold.

Based on the species found, the site would have been balmy, the team concluded.

"Parfitt and his colleagues have struck Stone Age gold," wrote Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at the University of Leiden, in a Nature commentary.

"Along with hippos, rhinos and elephants, early humans were evidently roaming the banks of these rivers. They did so during a warm interglacial period, and much earlier than hitherto thought for this part of Europe."

It's not known if the early humans used the flint tools to kill animals or scavenge carcasses left by predators. It is "useless to speculate on the technological capabilities" of the tool makers, Roebroeks agreed.

The artefacts and climate evidence suggests the pioneers expanded temporarily into northern Europe when it was warm enough, rather than colonizing the region, the scientists said.

A sparrow shot dead after flying into the middle of a Dutch world record attempt and knocking over 23,000 dominoes with one flap of its tiny wing is to be given pride of place at Rotterdam's Natural History Museum.

The bird, whose killing last month in the northern Dutch city of Leeuwarden enraged animal rights activists, will be placed on top of a box of dominoes at an exhibition.

The gesture will be greeted by many as a fitting tribute to the posthumously celebrated animal who almost ruined a painstakingly prepared world record dominoes attempt but was shot with an air rifle before it could wreak more havoc on the televised event.

Thousands of messages of condolence were sent after its death to the website dodemus - set up to record the storm of protest from people across the Netherlands. The Dutch animal protection agency had threatened to investigate the shooting and radio stations offered rewards for anyone who could knock down more of the dominoes before the event.

The sparrow's exterminator was fined â¬170 (Â£115) on Friday for shooting a protected species. The common house sparrow was added to the Dutch list of endangered species last year.

The television company Endemol filmed the attempt and said it felt "terrible" about the shooting, but organisers insisted the killing was justified, arguing the hard work of more than 100 people for the previous month should not have been allowed to be wasted by the unexpected arrival of a bird.

Participants in the record attempt went on to knock down about 4 million dominoes to claim a new record, yet to be verified by Guinness World Records.

As for the sparrow, it will be on display at the museum next year with another dead bird, famous for different reasons. The male duck, obtained posthumously by the exhibition's organiser, Kees Moeliker, is said to be the victim of the first scientifically documented case of "homosexual mallard necrophilia".

Comment: Oy. So many people upset by the killing of a sparrow because it knocked down dominoes, and they can't find it in their hearts to be upset over the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqis and Palestinians... and other genocidal acts by world governments... What kind of people would spend so much time and effort setting up dominoes, when the REAL dominoes of Global destruction have already fallen?